Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
August 29, 1992
Review/Film; One Long Last Gasp For Laura Palmer

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: August 29, 1992

Everything about David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" is a deception. It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be. Its 134 minutes induce a state of simulated brain death, an effect as easily attained in half the time by staring at the blinking lights on a Christmas tree.

The film, which opened yesterday, was put together for hard-core fans of the "Twin Peaks" television series, that is, for people so crackers over the show that they will pretend they don't know who killed Laura Palmer. Most others, including those who don't care, won't go to see the movie anyway.

Having already told the story of Laura Palmer's decline and fall in flashbacks, Mr. Lynch and Robert Engels, who collaborated with him on the screenplay, now elect to tell the same story more or less chronologically. Some characters from the television series appear in the film. Many do not. There are also a lot of new characters. The presence of some may be justified by the fact that they are phantoms, though of whose mind is never clear.

The awful truth about "Fire Walk With Me" is that Mr. Lynch is again plumbing the modest depths of the same kind of surrealism that looked fresher and funnier in his first film, "Eraserhead." Characters are introduced and disappear for no special reason, not even mystical. It seems more likely that actors of the caliber of Kieffer Sutherland and David Bowie could spend only a limited amount of time on the picture, and that Mr. Lynch accommodated them and himself by introducing into the script intimations of the occult. He can't get off the hook that easily.

At one point he would certify his surrealist credentials by showing a quick image of a white horse standing patiently in Laura Palmer's living room. This could be a quote from something by Luis Bunuel, but it would make as much sense inserted into a segment of "Golden Girls."

The director's imagination is on hold in "Fire Walk With Me." The film starts off with the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley), a young woman whose death foretells the fate of Laura Palmer, the beautiful high-school student who, as played Sheryl Lee, looks to be approaching her mid-30's. Poor ****-sniffing Laura never learned how to just say no.

At the film's beginning, Mr. Lynch makes a large cameo appearance as a F.B.I. agent who shouts a lot because he's deaf, and who sees in the death of Teresa Banks intimations of civilization's mortality. He assigns to the case two oddball agents, played by Mr. Sutherland and Chris Isaak, who vanish early on, to be replaced by good old Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who seems to be visiting this movie on his day off from the production of another.

Harry Dean Stanton comes on a couple of times as the bewildered manager of the Fat Trout Motor Court, not far from the town of Twin Peaks. Most of the movie is occupied by showing Laura's increasing hysteria as she tries to score more ****, to pacify her various boyfriends and to make sense of obscene daymares involving her dad (Ray Wise).

Because of the director's repeated use of long, lingering lap-dissolves, in which the images of one scene remain on the screen beneath the images of the succeeding scene, the film appears to be an undifferentiated mess of story lines and hallucinations. There's no reason to care which is which. Even Mr. Lynch's eccentric touches become boring. The jokes are stillborn.

"Fire Walk With Me" glazes the eyes and the mind. Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me

Directed by David Lynch; written by Mr. Lynch and Robert Engels; director of photography, Ron Garcia; edited by Mary Sweeney; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Patricia Norris; produced by Gregg Fienberg; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 134 minutes. This film is rated R. Laura Palmer . . . Sheryl Lee Leland Palmer . . . Ray Wise Special Agent Dale Cooper . . . Kyle MacLachlan Special Agent Chester Desmond . . . Chris Isaak Donna Hayward . . . Moira Kelly Carl Rodd . . . Harry Dean Stanton Phillip Jeffries . . . David Bowie "Fire Walk With Me," which has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian), has partial nudity, sexual situations and vulgar language.