1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 9: Mulholland Falls
Note: Please read the updates to the previous entry if you haven’t already done so.
And now, this month’s movie review.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Assembled into a whole, Mulholland Falls is nothing special, but some of its parts are compelling, even poetic. In its best passages, the movie resembles Night Moves (1975). Both movies are about tough but thoroughly urbanized detectives who are lured away from Los Angeles into weird tracts of wilderness.
(The same is arguably true of Chinatown. In that movie, however, the plot’s spiritual center remains in Los Angeles. In Mulholland Falls and Night Moves, the spiritual center is out in the middle of nowhere.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The worst scenes of Mulholland Falls wallow in domesticity. Melanie Griffith – memorable for her portrayal of a teenaged runaway in Night Moves – is cast in Mulholland Falls as the wife of the main detective, played by Nick Nolte. Her role is to be sinless (though she does smoke). This is not what Griffith excels at. One wonders if she was included simply because of her association with the earlier movie.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A slightly more interesting female character is the murder victim, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is revealed, in a series of flashbacks, to have been a warm-hearted prostitute. As the main story begins, her crushed body is discovered in a field where a new housing development is being built. Most of her bones have been broken. Her limbs are jelly-like.
This is the first interesting development. Why is this corpse in such an unusual state?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Investigating the Connelly character’s murder, four detectives of the L.A.P.D. follow a lead out into the desert. They arrive at a test site for atomic bombs.
The landscape has certain bizarre features. Its keepers, military minions, exhibit even bizarrer behavior.
The strangest person of all is their leader, General Timms, played by John Malkovich. This actor – often, in my view, miscast – is perfectly suited for his role in Mulholland Falls. His quaint flamboyance is disconcertingly out of step with the clean-cut conventionality of his subordinates.
People are mostly empty space, he tells the Nolte character. Only the oddities of physics keep them from falling through the floor.
Nolte’s detective has little use for this point of view. He recalls the dead woman: all too solid, with crushed bones.
And yet there is something ephemeral about their mission. In one scene out in the desert, the Nolte character and his fellow detectives stand on the edge of an enormous hole. Here, evidently, the ground has disappeared.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In another scene, the detectives sit inside a beach house, guarding a suspect. They’re unnerved by the rhythm of the ocean waves. They’d be comforted to hear traffic noises instead.
Suddenly, an officer keels over, dead. Solid bullets rip through walls that have been providing merely illusory protection. The detectives engage in a gunfight with unseen foe. When the dust settles, their suspect has disappeared, as if into thin air.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In such movies as these, there’s usually just one detective: a knight-errant. In this movie, the four detectives stick together. This benefits certain scenes. When the detectives look down into the gaping hole in the desert, it’s better that there are several of them to comment on it; they’re like a questing fellowship or a party of explorers. But in other scenes, the surplus of detectives is distracting.
Historically, mid-century Los Angeles was protected by a special police posse, the Hat Squad, that used strongarm tactics to discourage organized criminals from operating in that city. (Such policing would be depicted with considerably sharper focus one year later, in the great L.A. Confidential.) One of the ironies of Mulholland Falls is that the practitioners of strongarm tactics are themselves subjected to them outside of their own jurisdictions.
There are other tantalizing hints about the operations of the L.A.P.D. The detectives’ slimy boss, the always watchable Bruce Dern, appears for one glorious little scene. I wish the movie had given him a larger part. But so it goes with Mulholland Falls. There are some fine elements, but they aren’t woven together into a satisfying whole.
The same is true of the movie’s score, composed by Dave Grusin (whom I admire for composing the score for Lucas). Some of its passages are not very good, and the whole is a bit of a mess. But certain parts of it are lovely.
And now, this month’s movie review.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Assembled into a whole, Mulholland Falls is nothing special, but some of its parts are compelling, even poetic. In its best passages, the movie resembles Night Moves (1975). Both movies are about tough but thoroughly urbanized detectives who are lured away from Los Angeles into weird tracts of wilderness.
(The same is arguably true of Chinatown. In that movie, however, the plot’s spiritual center remains in Los Angeles. In Mulholland Falls and Night Moves, the spiritual center is out in the middle of nowhere.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The worst scenes of Mulholland Falls wallow in domesticity. Melanie Griffith – memorable for her portrayal of a teenaged runaway in Night Moves – is cast in Mulholland Falls as the wife of the main detective, played by Nick Nolte. Her role is to be sinless (though she does smoke). This is not what Griffith excels at. One wonders if she was included simply because of her association with the earlier movie.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
A slightly more interesting female character is the murder victim, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is revealed, in a series of flashbacks, to have been a warm-hearted prostitute. As the main story begins, her crushed body is discovered in a field where a new housing development is being built. Most of her bones have been broken. Her limbs are jelly-like.
This is the first interesting development. Why is this corpse in such an unusual state?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Investigating the Connelly character’s murder, four detectives of the L.A.P.D. follow a lead out into the desert. They arrive at a test site for atomic bombs.
The landscape has certain bizarre features. Its keepers, military minions, exhibit even bizarrer behavior.
The strangest person of all is their leader, General Timms, played by John Malkovich. This actor – often, in my view, miscast – is perfectly suited for his role in Mulholland Falls. His quaint flamboyance is disconcertingly out of step with the clean-cut conventionality of his subordinates.
People are mostly empty space, he tells the Nolte character. Only the oddities of physics keep them from falling through the floor.
Nolte’s detective has little use for this point of view. He recalls the dead woman: all too solid, with crushed bones.
And yet there is something ephemeral about their mission. In one scene out in the desert, the Nolte character and his fellow detectives stand on the edge of an enormous hole. Here, evidently, the ground has disappeared.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In another scene, the detectives sit inside a beach house, guarding a suspect. They’re unnerved by the rhythm of the ocean waves. They’d be comforted to hear traffic noises instead.
Suddenly, an officer keels over, dead. Solid bullets rip through walls that have been providing merely illusory protection. The detectives engage in a gunfight with unseen foe. When the dust settles, their suspect has disappeared, as if into thin air.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In such movies as these, there’s usually just one detective: a knight-errant. In this movie, the four detectives stick together. This benefits certain scenes. When the detectives look down into the gaping hole in the desert, it’s better that there are several of them to comment on it; they’re like a questing fellowship or a party of explorers. But in other scenes, the surplus of detectives is distracting.
Historically, mid-century Los Angeles was protected by a special police posse, the Hat Squad, that used strongarm tactics to discourage organized criminals from operating in that city. (Such policing would be depicted with considerably sharper focus one year later, in the great L.A. Confidential.) One of the ironies of Mulholland Falls is that the practitioners of strongarm tactics are themselves subjected to them outside of their own jurisdictions.
There are other tantalizing hints about the operations of the L.A.P.D. The detectives’ slimy boss, the always watchable Bruce Dern, appears for one glorious little scene. I wish the movie had given him a larger part. But so it goes with Mulholland Falls. There are some fine elements, but they aren’t woven together into a satisfying whole.
The same is true of the movie’s score, composed by Dave Grusin (whom I admire for composing the score for Lucas). Some of its passages are not very good, and the whole is a bit of a mess. But certain parts of it are lovely.
