It's not "Chinatown," Jake, but "Mulholland Falls" has a brutal power of its own. A Los Angeles-based period thriller strong on amorality and corruption, not to mention sex and violence, "Mulholland Falls" combines a vivid sense of place with a visceral directorial style that fuses controlled fury onto everything it touches.
After only two features, this aesthetic of brutality is becoming a trademark of New Zealand director Lee Tamahori. "Once Were Warriors," his intense debut film (made after considerable commercial work), was all crude energy and little delicacy. Not surprisingly, "Mulholland" has none of the elegance and sophistication of the Robert Towne/Roman Polanski classic, but Tamahori has his own unrelenting ways of holding an audience's attention.
For one thing, the director has imposed his sledgehammer technique and pulp sensibility on his players. Stars Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palminteri and John Malkovich, plus key supporting actors Jennifer Connelly, Andrew McCarthy and Treat Williams, form an ensemble in sync with the film's neo-noir sensibility.
Set in the Los Angeles of the early 1950s, "Mulholland" benefits from the expertise of production designer Richard Sylbert and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, two of the best. Working with costume designer Ellen Mirojnick and set decorator Claire Jenora Brown, they've created a paradoxical world where venality and sleaze are as stubbornly pervasive as sunshine.
The film's script, credited to novelist Pete Dexter from a story by Dexter and Floyd Mutrux, plays around with hard-boiled dialogue of the "Who are you?"/"You won't find out by killing me" variety without calling excessive attention to itself. Its technique is to take simple plot elements and so scramble them in the telling, revealing secrets one tiny glimpse at a time, that the narrative drive doesn't falter.
Also, in a possible nod to "Kiss Me Deadly," a key thriller also set in 1950s Los Angeles, "Mulholland Falls" makes use of the atomic bomb the way "Chinatown" used water, as a sinister element whose shadow corrupts everything that crosses its path.
"Mulholland Falls" starts with something more low-tech but also unnerving: the steady click-clack-click of a 16-millimeter projector. Shown under the credits are unsettling fragments of black-and-white film: scenes of a pool party, some images of an Army base and then, should your interest be waning, glimpses of a graphic sexual encounter effectively shot like an upscale stag film.
