Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22675 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-04-08
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Import, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 135 minutes

Amazon.com
Plot is a meaningless term when trying to describe Lost Highway. Here, more or less, is what happens: A noise-jazz saxophonist (Bill Pullman) suspects his wife (Patricia Arquette) of infidelity. Meanwhile, someone is breaking into their house and videotaping them while they sleep. The wife is murdered and Pullman is convicted of the crime. Then, in prison, he transmogrifies into a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who is subsequently released, since, after all, he's not the guy they convicted. Getty goes back to his life and meets a local gangster's moll, who happens to be played by Patricia Arquette... but none of this has much to do with what the movie is really about. Dreams are what intrigues director David Lynch. Not friendly, happy dreams; his dreams whisper that what we think is real is just something we made up, something to keep ourselves from falling into chaos. Characters are fragments. Events happen not because they make sense, but because deep down we want these things to happen. Of course, in Lynch's dreams, as in our waking lives, getting what we want is not always pleasant. In the movie's best moments, you really have no idea what you're seeing. The screen is a big rectangle of color and shadow, but what it represents, well, it could be anything. And yet, in those moments, you've been given just enough hints of place, character, and story that these elusive images elicit a genuine dread, a sense that you might not want to see this, yet you can't look away; a sense that we are living on borrowed time, that something is fiercely askew in our psyches. As a whole, Lost Highway is a failure: much of it is padded, gratuitous, and indulgent and pointless cameos bog down an already sluggish narrative. Yet within that failure are moments worth more than the entirety of most successful movies. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

Limps across the finish line.
Parts of Lost Highway are David Lynch's best work, in my opinion -- namely, the first half-hour or so. It is a brilliant satire of Los Angeles. The David Bowie song couldn't be better. Lynch's style has never been better.

Where things go horribly wrong is when the film veers in a totally absurdist direction by completely breaking the fourth wall and creating a dual narrative filled with doppelgangers and parallel structure. Now, while this is a promising idea, it means as a screenwriter your task is going to be exceptionally difficult to make a compelling story and have your audience experience a sense of drama that only this structure can provide. Yet Lynch has absolutely no interest in this and is not up for the challenge. Lost Highway only works as a David Lynch tone-poem, like two hours of half-baked ideas masquerading as a film. It's sophomoric and the parallel structure only serves as a gimmick.

But what is particularly irritating is that Lynch is not happy just letting plot take a backseat -- this film is nothing but plot and more plot; don't look for compelling characters. The performances are either completely over-the-top (Robert Loggia, Robert Blake) or uniformly dull (Balthazar Getty). I have no idea what Lynch was thinking in his direction of Patricia Arquette, but as the femme fatale at the center of this movie she gives one of the worst film performances in history. I understand...it's all postmodern, right? Well, this is a woman that has apparently driven a man into fits of homicidal rage, mental illness, schizophrenia, what have you. Oh but I guess conveniently one could make the argument that her mannerisms are all just reflections of the protagonist's dementia...right? Lost Highway's fans are notorious for arguments such as that one.

When Lynch has the chance to really create a pivotal scene, in which the Patricia Arquette character is reintroduced with blonde hair, he pulls the ultimate hipster cop-out and downs out the soundtrack with a Lou Reed song. It's beyond cheesy.

And then Lynch has the nerve to make it out that what we have watched is just one brilliant cyclical narrative, which is quite simply annoying and makes no sense even within the film's internal logic. Lost Highway makes a mockery of film noir. No amount of "Rammstein" cranked on the soundtrack can smother that fact.

This is Elegant Dark Art
Yes, this film has Logic & a Plot!
It is not the familiar Logic and No familiar plot, nonetheless - it is a dark & elegant piece of art.
Here a witch-man played by Robert Blake curses and stalks a young monotonous couple to shake up their life - similar to the dumpster-witch in Mulholland Drive. (Witch herein is used in the popular sense, not the true respected sense).
Upon playing mind-games with the couple - Blake's character discovers where the plot should really take place - in an abandoned wooden hut in the middle of the desert, however to get to the plot - the mechanic, the cars and the jazz-playing couple need to get onto ... LOST HIGHWAY.
AWESOME, AWESOME, AWESOME!

Lost Gem! Lynch's most underrated film
"Lost Highway" is a wonder of a movie. It is a compelling dream-film with its own haunting nightmare logic. Most critics didn't like it. I think this is a film that bothered critics because they didn't know how to react to it. It's hard to judge the film in a conventional manner because, in many ways, this is the ultimate renegade film. Like an abstract painting, it engages the audience (if they are willing) to come up with their own interpretation of, not only what it all means, but, fundamentally, what has transpired.

See it!