Inland Empire

David Lynch’s three-hour head trip, made over a two-year span on charmingly low-definition video, was crafted as lovingly—and as obliviously—as a home movie. The central story concerns an actress (Laura Dern) who has been out of work and in gilded isolation with her tyrannical Polish husband (Peter J. Lucas); when she gets a starring role in a major movie, she finds her identity merging with that of the character, an adulterous wife. When Lynch sticks with his straightforward view of how things are done in Hollywood, the film briefly comes alive as a trenchant, nuanced report from the front. But he also shoehorns in lugubrious scenes from Poland, a sitcom apartment inhabited by people wearing rabbit heads, and mysterious appearances and disappearances, and jumbles the strands together as a pretentious puzzle. The resulting grab bag of Lynchian motifs and methods—grotesque character actors, saccharine pop music, grind-house camp, horror clichés, gratuitous gore, chipmunk voices, jejune sex play, theatrical tableaux, and mystical hokum—quickly devolves into self-parody. Dern gives a virtuoso performance, albeit in an overwrought, numbing void.(Dec. 1.)