Synopsis

A college student returns to his hometown to attend to his ill father. One day he makes a grisly discovery in an abandoned lot and soon finds himself neck deep in the town's hidden underworld of violence, drugs, perversion and corruption.

Pros:

• It's a trendsetter. You may have never seen Blue Velvet, but you've probably seen movies made by people who love this film.


• Dennis Hopper is one of the best when it comes to playing psychos. This movie might be his personal apex in that regard.


• If you like weird you'll find plenty to like here.

Cons:

• If you don't like weird this movie will annoy and/or upset you.


• The closing scenes are weak and feel contrived. I think director David Lynch may have been forced into an ending that just doesn't fit the film.


• You might feel the need to take a hot shower and scrub yourself with Ajax after watching Blue Velvet.

Generally:

3.5 on a five scale. David Lynch fans often call this his masterpiece. If oddball cinema is your thing, this one is a must-see ... genre fans will, I'm sure, rate this movie far higher than I do.

Extended Review:

I first saw Blue Velvet twenty years ago and I saw it again tonight. I liked it both times, but for different reasons. The first time I saw it I was just amazed by the balls-to-the-wall weirdness of the story and characters. This time I found myself entertained on kind of an academic level. I got a big kick out of the way director David Lynch and his cast seem to gleefully break all the rules of "good cinema."

There's symbolism in the movie, but it's overt and ham-fisted. Symbolic imagery is usually done with some subtlety. Symbols work best on a subconscious level. But in Blue Velvet, Lynch wanted everything in your face. So he cue's the audience that Blue Velvet is set in an idyllic little town with close-ups of flower-beds, white picket fences, and smiling fire-men, waving from the back of parade-ready fire-trucks.

Under the surface of Small Town USA there's an unseen criminal element that's just teeming with destruction and evil. Lynch lets us in on that early on in the film with yet another obvious symbol as his camera takes the viewers literally underground to see worms and bugs engaged in a chaotic death match.

Disjointed shots of a candle being blown out, relative to absolutely nothing in the story, sporadically signal the audience that some dark stuff is about to go down.

Kyle McLachlan's performance is, I think, deliberately wooden. He isn't playing a character here so much as satirizing an archetype. His character is Jeffery (not Jeff) who's so button-down and straight laced that he comes across like a mannequin, only not as hyperactive. As his reliable, respectable girl, Laura Dern is only missing the poodle skirt and bobby socks.

Kyle and Laura find themselves drawn into their town's dark side when they set out, Nancy Drew style, to solve a really neato mystery. But the underground in this town isn't an Eddie Haskel kind of scene. These bad guys are rapists, murderers, corrupt cops, perverts and drug pushers. Blue Velvet's bad guys aren't just bad ... they're evil.

As the damsel in distress ... a damsel who seems to relish her particular form of distress ... Isabella Rossellini is occasionally heartbreaking and often horrifying. If there's any subtlety in the movie, it's to be found in Rossellini's eyes. One important, late scene concerns Rossellini interacting with a child. She hugs the boy maternally, but her eyes briefly widen with a kind of numb horror ... and then the look is gone. Rossellini makes her character haunted and haunting, even in an ending that's far too upbeat for a movie filled with so much doom.

And then there's Dennis Hopper as a villain, Frank, with the strangest fetishes, addictions, habits, hobbies and motives of any movie bad guy in the last 50 years of cinema. This character is the psychotic leader of a psychotic gang, but maybe psychotic isn't the word. Maybe "psychotic" would be a step toward sanity for Frank. This guy physically attacks, verbally bludgeons, torments, tortures and kills. But that's not enough for Lynch. He wants to make sure that you know without a doubt that the Hopper character is waaaayyyy worse than anyone else in the movie. So Hopper's character is the only one in the entire movie that swears, and he slips the f-word into just about every one of his utterances. And then to put the icing on the cake, Frank seems to be playing it all for laughs. This is the creepiest of all of Hopper's creepy performances.

If this were another movie from another time, Blue Velvet's "evil under the rug of small town America" theme might play like a political statement. But there's just nothing political here. Lynch isn't interested in grand statements. In spite of all the bluster and bombast ... or maybe because of it ... Blue Velvet is really a movie about the quietest feelings, the ones we keep to ourselves. Paranoia. Dread. Grief. Loneliness.

Blue Velvet works as both a satire of and a tribute to a small town lifestyle that probably only ever existed in the movies and TV shows of the fifties and sixties. And it works, too, as a suspense film and a horror movie. It works in the same way that the best comic books work ... with a sort of earnest superficiality that's both compelling and cartoonish. The movie is obvious, outlandish and outrageous. It's also deeply sincere and sometimes very moving. You'll probably either hate it by the end of the first half hour or love it by the time the credits roll.

My personal favorite David Lynch film is The Straight Story, a low-key anomaly among his usually bizarre films. Some of his work has left me shaking my head, sometimes in confusion, sometimes with contempt. Blue Velvet is a weird film, to be sure. But when it comes to getting his weird on, Lynch never did it better than he did here.

Trailer:

Labels: Movie Reviews, Movies