lostcheerio

Liking Jude Law has been elevated to the level of national pastime among my demographic. The last few movies I've seen him in, he was in his clever fop mode, and I started losing sight of why. In this movie, he was different. Spectacularly different. I never watched this movie when it came out, because I thought it was going to be sappy. It was not. The reason is Jude Law and his fierce, raw performance as the soldier dude who leaves the confederate army after coming back from the brink of death from a gunshot. He leaves to walk a thousand miles through a war zone, avoiding the home guard who want to put him back in the army. The reason he walks is Nicole Kidman, the awkward and beautiful belle he left back home in Cold Mountain, was being harassed by locals and starved by the war. She wrote him a letter telling him she needed him back.

It's rare when two actors can make love at first sight work on screen. These do.

Another reason I didn't watch it was that I have an irrational dislike for Renee Zellwegger and she got so much attention for her role, which I thought would be too precious. It was a little precious, but also was hilarious. In this very dark movie, which had me crying a bunch of times, it was a welcome bit of levity.

I'm glad I watched it finally. Wouldn't want to do it again soon, because of the wrenching sadness. In the ethos of this movie, there are more than two sides in a war, and none of them are good. The victims are the soldiers, the civilians, and everyone affected by the changed rules of war. "Hey, there's a war on," is an excuse for a lot of sick injustice, and that doesn't ever seem to change.

The children liked it but they weren't riveted. That's the short of it. It wasn't a shocking disaster, but it was just a bit muddled. A little scattered. Fragmented. It failed to engage me.

But let's be positive. The writers wisely decided to vastly expand the role of Scrat the Squirrel in this version. Periodically we get to take a break from watching the mammoth, sloth, tiger, possums, and other mammoth walk very slowly along toward the vague "other end" of a vague "valley" to avoid a flood that is being caused by global warming. We get to step back from the grindingly uninspired mammoth love story and the other many subplots that go with the many characters. We get to watch a squirrel chase an acorn. And those sequences present some of the funniest bits in the film.

The rest of it is just kind of there. One problem is that there's really no reason for a sloth, a tiger, and a mammoth to be casting their lots together, except that they did in the first movie. That movie, I felt, had a storyline that involved actual characterization, growth, change, a real tension, etc. When the tiger almost fell off the cliff in Ice Age #1, I gasped. This time, I fidgeted. It just didn't seem real. And that's what I want from an animated movie about talking prehistoric animals -- REALNESS. No, but seriously, without some degree of actual jeopardy, of actual question of what will happen from scene to scene, without someone to root for and embrace -- it's just pointless.

The only character I was getting that for was the saber tooth squirrel. They could have saved a lot of money in celebrity voices.

Everyone had a subplot because they had to have something to do, so that was tidily arranged for them. But nobody's subplot had anything to do with the others'. And the global storyline about the flood was just a reason to walk... slowly. Slowly walk. And pester each other half-heartedly about how they were all going to die. Or not.

Like I said, the children didn't complain. I did laugh, many times, at the places I was supposed to. But it wasn't great.

It only took 24 hours, one Salon article, two conversations with smart thoughtful people, and twenty minutes of careful reflection on the way to the gym. I finally understand Mulholland Drive. Partially. Well mostly. Well sort of.

It's complicated.

The problem is that there are so many red herrings. And most of them are blue. In a complicated, non-linear, surreal type of movie you kind of expect that everything will be miraculously clarified, resolved, and tied back together in the end. I'm thinking of Memento, and Run Lola Run, and Go, and that episode of the Simpsons, for example. There's a certain expectation that no matter how weird it gets, it'll all be fine, because the director may dangle you over the edge, but he will definitely pull you back. With Mulholland Drive, you have no such assurance. All kinds of stuff is unexplained, and you're left with only a weak grasp of "what really happened." But don't sweat it. There's a whole lot of kinda robotic and predictable "girl love" scenes to console you.

There are also some familiar elements here. There's the sweet, innocent blonde character and the troubled, abused brunette with the very red lips. Kinda reminiscent of Isabella Rossellini and Laura Dern in Blue Velvet. There is also the soundtrack – very familiar and almost an instant hook-up to that feeling David Lynch movies give you that the bizarre and macabre are right behind the pretty flowers, the nondescript door, the next turn. There are unforgettable scenes here, and I'm sure if I went back through it, and tried to connect the dots, I'd find more scaffolding to help me understand. It's not really necessary though. Taken as an aggregate of its parts, rather than a sum, the movie is still rich and provocative. Nobody makes you feel like this – excited, confused, horrified, complicit, and satisfied – like David Lynch. At the end of the film, I'd rather be surprised and incited than have everything figured out.