BEFORE: Linking from "China Moon", an actor named Pruitt Taylor Vince carries over, playing minor roles in both films.
THE PLOT: Young lovers Sailor and Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula's mom has hired to kill Sailor.
AFTER: I'd thought this was a film about people running from a hit-man, but after watching it I'm not sure who the hit-man was. Heck, I'm not sure who anybody really was - that's the chance you take with a David Lynch film, I guess. Sailor did kill a guy, and Lula's mother wanted him dead, but after that things got very unclear.
I'm not sure if this was the right place to schedule this film - for that matter, I'm not sure if any place would be the right place, that's how weird the film is. There is a basic plot - Sailor gets out of jail, picks up Lula and they head for California - but that's too easy somehow, and doesn't begin to explain all the ultra-weird things that happen along the way. First off, they only get as far as a town in Texas, which seems to be filled with people that Sailor knows, and other unsavory types.
Lula's mother hires a detective, but also contacts the mob - very little of what she does makes sense, like covering her entire face with lipstick for some reason. She also drinks a lot and screams a lot. Her daughter is very emotional too, so pretty much every woman in the film is either crying, screaming or in some form of ecstasy at any given moment.
Mostly everyone just seems sort of aimless. There's a robbery that goes bad, Sailor only seems to get involved because he's got nothing better to do - he knows you can say "no", right? There's an alarming number of car accidents - or car accident scenes, I suppose, seen after the accident has occurred, plus a lot of references to "The Wizard of Oz", for some reason. Or no reason.
It's frustrating because there seem to be a lot of pieces here, and nobody took the time to stitch them together, or felt it wasn't important to do so. Around the same time, David Lynch was producing (and directing the best episodes of) a TV series called "Twin Peaks", which was just as enigmatic in its own way. As an FBI agent teamed up with local Washington state law enforcement to solve the murder of a teen girl named Laura Palmer, elements of mysticism surfaced, suggesting there was more to the town than there seemed to be. There was a spirit that inhabited human hosts and made them kill, and other spirits represented by a dwarf and a giant seemed to fighting for good.
In an average episode, not much happened - there were enough local oddballs to entertain and distract from the central plotline, but Lynch would direct the first and last episode of each season, and somehow this would tie everything together, while being completely symbolic and obtuse and still making perfect sense if you were willing to buy into it.
Half of the cast of "Twin Peaks" also appears in this film, but that's not enough to save it. The pieces didn't come together for me, and without any attempt to explain anything that's happening, I'm just left with random bits of weirdness.
EDIT: Upon further review, the plot makes a little bit more sense than I first thought. I checked a few plot summaries online, which suggested that the hit-man sent after Sailor was the same guy who planned the botched robbery. This is a clever way to try and kill someone, I'll admit. That being said, however, leads me to a NITPICK POINT: If the hit-man's preferred way of killing people was to stage car accidents (which sort of explains why there were so many in that part of the world), then why change up his modus operandi just to kill one guy? This again doesn't seem to make much sense, so the rating stands.
Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Windtalkers"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Recount"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Mexico"), Diane Ladd (last seen in "Chinatown"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "The Avengers"), Isabella Rossellini, J.E. Freeman, with cameos from Crispin Glover (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Sherilyn Fenn, Grace Zabriskie (last seen in "License to Wed"), Jack Nance, David Patrick Kelly, Sheryl Lee, John Lurie, KoKo Taylor.
RATING: 2 out of 10 silver dollars
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