Laura Dern Week: INLAND EMPIRE.
Thursday, February 9, 2017 at 3:00PM We're celebrating the great Laura Dern all week in honour of her 50th birthday. Here's David on the film that sent her down a rabbit hole...
It would be easy for an actor to be a puppet in a David Lynch film, lost as they are in a labyrinthine maze of the mind. The chronology is distorted and the characters’ consciousness is constantly splitting and merging in a kaleidoscope fashion. Laura Dern, though, knows the director better than most, and their most recent collaboration, 2006’s INLAND EMPIRE., places at her at the centre of an intricate puzzle of which she is all of the pieces...
Introduced as a rich Hollywood actress ready to make a comeback, the experience of making the film quickly plunges her into worlds utterly divergent from the vast opulence she initially enjoys. Our fiction and her fiction intermingle within Lynch’s diabolically playful adoption of digital filming techniques that were, at the time, revelatory. Much of the film plays like Big Brother is watching her, taking vantage points as if a hidden camera has been planted there, whether across the room or on the wall right next to her face, her striking features lengthening from the proximity.
Dern has never been an actress afraid of her physical distinctiveness, and INLAND EMPIRE.'s most iconic image is probably that of her terrifyingly clownish face superimposed upon a ghoulish corridor dweller. Throughout, both Lynch and Dern confront the audience with the excessiveness of her facial features, using her long nose, wide chin and prominent frown lines to create a character whose reactive physicality is equally vital as her emotional vibrancy.
What Dern does is remarkable; she simultaneously acts as a cypher and as a conduit for the audience. When Grace Zabriskie unfurls her unnerving insights into her new neighbour's career, Dern's look of utterly baffled terror is perfect; both she and the audience do not know what is happening or what there is to be scared of. Her emotion is direct and elemental; even if its origin is mystifying, it registers and affects the audience on an intuitive level.
Dern's performance in INLAND EMPIRE. may be the apotheosis of her career, the ideal communion of her physical pliability and her emotional vitality. If nothing else, it led David Lynch to an Oscar campaign where he sat on an L.A. roadside with a billboard poster and a live cow. What more endorsement do you need?
Reader Comments (5)
This is, in my view, Laura Dern's best performance; I can only describe the experience of watching "INLAND EMPIRE" as entering a wormhole of nightmarish images and cacophonous sounds, with Laura Dern as the sole element to grab on to, and yet she is more unexpectedly intense and merciless than ant element around her, and it's just wonderful.
Yet Lynch has always been able to get great performances out of his actresses, with Sheryl Lee in "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" being easily at the top of the group, and Naomi Watts in "Mulholland Drive" coming not very far behind, and so Laura Dern in "INLAND EMPIRE" completes the hoy triad....
Laura Dern should have won an Oscar for this.
@Roger-Agree! She was severely overlooked in the awards season.
That year was particularly strong in the Best Actress category, just a little too hard to crack. I would actually switch out the winner (Mirren) for Dern.
One of the most egregious snubs in Best Actress history. Great write-up!