436
PARTISAN REVIEW
money who is suffering from amnesia,
Mulholland Drive
plays inven–
tively on the conventions of film noir. Searching for her identity, she is
joined by a perky blonde, newly arrived in Hollywood, who is trying to
break into movies. For more than an hour and a half we follow the
odyssey of these two women though a landscape of Hollywood
grotesques as they try to unravel the mystery. This no doubt is the part
of the movie that was conceived and then rejected as the pilot for a TV
series, a Southern California version of
Twin Peaks.
At this point, both
the characters and the movie as a whole morph into something more
grim and puzzling, which makes us guess that the first part of the film
was only imagined by one of the women in the desperate hours between
the time she puts out a hit on the other woman and takes her own life.
Or so it seems, for nothing is quite certain in this curiously compelling
world that is never as mordant as
Ghost World
but never straightfor–
ward either.
Mulholland Drive
makes much more sense on a second
viewing, but Lynch's imagination is so distinctive that the film keeps our
interest even when it stymies and tantalizes our understanding.
The most eagerly awaited film of the festival, Wes Anderson's
The
Royal Tenenbaums
was as stylized as
Ghost World
and
Mulholland
Drive
but its storybook mannerisms and rigid framing squeezed the life
out of its characters. Anderson is best known for his 1998 comedy
Rushmore,
which pitted Jason Schwartzman as a super-bright high
school student against his dour mentor, an eccentric tycoon played by
the incomparable Bill Murray. The first half of the film was so exuber–
antly inventive, so fresh and quirky, that it was astonishing to see it dis–
integrate into an unbearably cute shaggy-dog story as it went on. In a
long interview with Rick Lyman in the
New York Times
(January
II,
2002),
Anderson claimed an affinity with Francois Truffaut, whose
work with children and adolescents always felt so effortlessly sponta–
neous. But the three unhappy Tenenbaum siblings, thwarted geniuses
all, resemble nothing so much as Salinger's Glass family, prodigies
whose lives have been damaged by their scapegrace father, Royal (Gene
Hackman), and by the curse of their own gifts. Returning to his family
after abandoning them twenty years earlier, Hackman plays the irre–
sponsible but fun-loving paterfamilias with a con man's zest and an
infectious appetite for life. He is incapable of being embarrassed by his
own misdeeds, and his larky buoyancy makes the other characters feel
pinched and two-dimensional, above all his three children, played by
Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke Wilson, who have made stereo–
typical messes of their adult experiences. As with the Glass family, their
deepest feelings are reserved for their siblings. Their incestuous emo-
