By Todd Garbarini
There
are a handful of films that I hated the first time that I viewed them, but upon
subsequent viewings have all come to be beloved favorites of mine. James Toback’s Fingers (1978) was an incoherent mess to my naïve, nineteen
year-old eyes but was revealed to be one of the cinema’s greatest character
studies years later; William Friedkin’s To
Live and Die in L.A. (1985) seemed like a Miami Vice wanna-be, but is now
one of the best police thrillers ever and gives the average person a hint of
what it must be like to be a cop; and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) was…well…strange. The film was…confusing…boring…aimless…weird…My
friends and I honestly didn’t know what to make of it after we stumbled out of
the theater in October 1986 and pondered what we has just viewed for two
hours. We were honestly at a loss. What I didn’t realize was that I had just seen
David Lynch’s best film.
Filmed
between February and April in 1986, Blue
Velvet is about many things, and the main theme is set up beautifully in
the first few minutes after the main title credits roll over a blue velvet robe. It deals with the ugliness and rage that lies
beneath the surface of people’s faces and the beautiful sunny, white
picket-fenced suburbs. The milieu
doesn’t actually give us the impression that it takes place during the
mid-Eighties; there are visual references that almost suggest a time and place
thirty years earlier, but in keeping with the film’s themes it is very
subtle. From a plot perspective, Jeffrey
Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home to handle things after his father has
taken sick after suffering a stroke in a scene that recall Don Corleone’s death
in The Godfather (1972). On his way home from seeing his father in the
hospital, he walks through a wooded area and discovers a severed human ear,
which he brings to Police Detective Williams (George Dickerson). His daughter Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) is
still in high school and knows details about the case since her room is above his
office, which she imparts to Jeffery over lunch. The case involves a singer, Dorothy Vallens
(Isabella Rossellini in a wonderful and courageous performance), and her
kidnapped husband and son. Jeffrey is
intrigued to the point that he hatches a plan with Sandy to gain access to
Dorothy’s apartment and spy on her from inside her closet. What follows is one of the most startling
mysteries ever filmed filled with some truly strange characters. The film is bolstered by a brilliant
performance by Dennis Hopper as Frank, one of cinema’s most frightening villains. I am willing to bet that Frank wasn’t much of
a stretch for the late great actor to portray. The scene where Frank takes Dorothy and Jeffery on a joyride is very unnerving.
Blue Velvet runs 121 minutes and should be a
textbook example of excellent editing. The cinematography by Frederick Elmes, the sound design by Alan Splet,
and the luminous score by Angelo Badalamenti heighten the film into a work of
art. There are visual and directorial
flourishes that are reminders of Mr. Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977).
Past
video incarnations of the film have been hard to swallow: the VHS tape lost the
Panavision framing and the laserdisc, while letterboxed, was murky at
best. The standard DVD’s (the film was
released twice in this format, within two years of each other no less) were the
best way to see the film at the time. Now,
thankfully, audiences can see Blue Velvet on Blu-ray which comes to us courtesy
of Fox Home Video, and the results are astonishing. The transfer alone is reason enough to
upgrade. Not only does the film look
glorious, but the Blu-ray, which contains all of the extras from the 2002 DVD,
contains two additions, one of them major. The first exclusive supplement is a series of very short pieces collected
in the “Vignettes†section. Second, the
film’s original running time was reportedly four hours, and director Lynch was
contractually obligated to deliver a two-hour cut of the film. For years, the footage was thought to be lost,
but some of it has been recently unearthed in a warehouse in Seattle, WA. The Blu-ray contains just over 50 minutes of
footage that had been cut from the four-hour version. Fully answer-printed and scored, the footage
is presented in high definition and consists mainly of one-take master shots,
exposition, and establishing shots. It
is easy to see why the director excised this footage, but its inclusion is a
wonderful addition that gives audiences the opportunity to see what choices the
director made in taking all of the raw footage and constructing a masterpiece
out of it.
I
never thought I would hear myself say this, but twenty five years after seeing
the film, I can honestly say that Blue Velvet is one of the greatest films of all-time.
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