Director: David Lynch
Genre(s): Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Runtime: 120 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
One day, resident of American suburbia Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a decomposing, severed human ear in a field, setting him off on an investigation to find out whose it is. It’s a set-up to a wildly popular mystery-thriller, but this one failed to get under my skin the way it has for countless other viewers. I appreciate director David Lynch’s style, but Blue Velvet is one of his more forgettable feature films in my experience.
This semi-surreal thriller is set in a weird version of suburbia that seems uncanny. Something’s “off.” There’s an undercurrent of melancholy. Blue Velvet is all about the sinister mysteries that could be lurking under the clean veneer of your hometown, just waiting to be discovered if you only wanted to find them. This film dares to explore the dark corners of its community, and the results are somewhat disappointing. It’s not a bad movie, it’s just not terribly memorable.
The best part of this work is Dennis Hopper’s unpredictable, foul-mouthed, gas-huffing villain, Frank Booth. However, the motion picture could have benefited from some more surrealism, in my opinion. For a David Lynch flick, it almost feels too “normal” at times. Sure, there’s that classic Lynchian sense of unease, but I think I might’ve preferred the movie if it was Eraserhead Moves to the Suburbs. Many, perhaps most, will disagree with this take, but I’ll stand by it for now.
I like the ideas that went into Blue Velvet, but the execution didn’t thrill me. It does have all the right elements of a crackerjack thriller. It’s a respectable neo-noir as it stands now, but I just don’t enjoy it as much as most people seem to. This picture is frequently hailed as a masterpiece, and I can sort of see why, yet I can’t really agree with the consensus. It’s too odd to be a conventional mystery feature, yet not crazy enough to be a full-on David Lynch “freak-show” extravaganza.
My rating is 6 outta 10.
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