Meet
Laura Palmer….
In a town where nothing is as it seems….
and everyone has something to hide.
1992 – 135 minutes
“Who Killed Laura Palmer?” became the most talked
about TV phenomenon of the decade. Now,
acclaimed director Dave Lynch (Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet) takes us back tot he
town of damn good coffee and cherry pie in this all-new film prequel where we
actually meet Laura Palmer for the first time.
Brought in to investigate the mysterious death of a
nightshift waitress named Teresa Banks, special agent Chester Desmond (Chris
Isaak I Married to the Mob) is joined by Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale
Cooper to unravel the bizarre clues, mysterious disappearances, and strange
happenings that lead to ….the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s troubled
life….and ultimately the killer.
The ghost who
haunted the series, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), holds the spotlight here as a
troubled teen leading a double life in the eponymous town. By day she's a top
student hanging out with her innocent best friend Donna Hayward (Moira Kelly)
and nice-guy boyfriend James Hurley (James Marshall). By night, she's an
overheated coke fiend carrying on a sleazy liaison with dope dealer Bobby Briggs
(Dana Ashbrook). After dark, she trades in her pleated skirts and bobby sox for
high heels and garter belts, presumably paying for her habit by being an
attraction at an underground sex club run by the loathsome Jacques Renault
(Walter Olkewicz), where she gets pawed over by drunken loggers.
The source of
Laura's self-destructiveness is traced to long-term sexual abuse by her father,
Leland (Ray Wise), who, while possessed by evil spirit Bob (Frank Silva), has
regularly raped her since she was twelve. When Laura realizes that she is
leading Donna down a similar path of doom, she has an attack of conscience
leading her to face up to the truth about herself and her father. Leland,
meanwhile, stumbles upon Laura's secret life when his mistress inadvertently
sets him up on a "date" with Laura during an out-of-town business
trip.
Driven mad by
jealousy, he follows Laura and friend Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) to a
sex party with Renault and Leo Johnson (Eric DaRe) in an abandoned railroad car.
It is there that he knocks Leo unconscious and scares off Renault before beating
Ronette into a coma and murdering his daughter, dumping her body into the river,
where it surfaces for the first scene of the series.
It's getting to be
an old story, but TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME apparently underwent some
drastic trimming before reaching American screens, somehow losing 20 minutes of
its original running time after it was nearly booed off screens during its world
premiere at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. What's left isn't that bad,
but it's far from Lynch's best work.
The feverish
conviction that made Lynch's earlier films as controversial as they were
gripping has given way to a cheap-looking, cheesy campiness here. Besides
rehashing the series--also provided are back stories on characters such as town
poet Harold Smith (Lenny Van Dohlen), filling in how he wound up with Laura's
diary, and the source of Bobby's enmity with Leo (he killed one of Leo's drug
couriers)--TWIN PEAKS also rehashes Lynch's obsession with the dark underbelly
of smalltown life that he had already treated more compellingly in BLUE VELVET.
Here, he doesn't
have much to add, except possible consumer deception. Despite prominent listings
among the cast, such series regulars as Peggy Lipton, Madchen Amick, Miguel
Ferrer and Kyle MacLachlan have little more than one-or-two-scene cameo roles,
as do guest stars such as David Bowie and Kiefer Sutherland. Further down the
cast list, we must have blinked and missed appearances by other listed series
stars like Jack Nance, Wendy Robie, Joan Chen and Michael Horse--or maybe they
were among the casualties in the cutting room.
What
redeems TWIN PEAKS, if anything, is Lee's performance, a fearsomely commanding
star turn following token appearances in the series (as Laura's look-alike
cousin, also murdered by Leland) and in WILD AT HEART. While Lynch ladles on the
random weirdness around the edges, it is Lee who keeps the film centered, with a
harrowing but poignantly sympathetic portrait of a woman's descent into horror
and madness.
(Violence, substance abuse, profanity,
nudity, sexual situations.)
