Word: maclachlan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Switch to the hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who has just found a human ear in a field. He takes it to the Lumberton police and carries out a personal investigation that leads him to Sandy Williams, the chief's daughter (Laura Dern), Dorothy Vallens, a masochistic torch singer (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank Booth, a perverted drug dealer (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey discovers that Vallens' son and husband have been kidnapped by Booth, and his effort to intervene opens realms of violence and sexuality he never knew possible...
...Kyle MacLachlan is outstanding as Jeffrey. With his paperboy face and barely noticeable earring, he meets and hurdles each awful rite of passage with marked confidence. Laura Dern makes for terrific chemistry with MacLachlan; she slow dances and sips Heineken like a runner-up Homecoming Queen and proclaims with detached conviction, "It's a strange world." Isabella Rossellini is all lips and eyes as the tortured chanteuse. "Hit me, hit me," that S&M cliche, has resonance and poignancy in the context of her performance. Dennis Hopper is to-the-core nasty as the vile drug-killer; he was better...
...Things got a little out of hand," nice young Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) tells his nice young friend Sandy (Laura Dern). Well, yes. Walking through the woods of peaceful Lumberton, Jeffrey found a severed human ear crawling with ants. The ear belonged to a man who, with his son, had been kidnaped by Frank (Dennis Hopper), a sicko on a helium high. Frank was blackmailing the man's wife Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and hiding in Dorothy's closet, Jeffrey watched Frank work his awful sexual will on her. When Dorothy discovered Jeffrey, she took him to bed. "Hurt me," she said...
...Only the images are deep and dense. The friendly loggers of Lumberton wave at the camera; Frank screams an obscenity and poof! disappears; a corpse is bound and bowed like a Kienholz sculpture; the climactic gun battle takes just a few shorthand strokes. The acting styles collide fiercely too. MacLachlan and Dern have an innocents-in-hell sweetness; Stockwell does a preening Percy Dovetonsils number; Rossellini is a madwoman with all stops out; Hopper tops her, with maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history...
...Plain and Tall, concurs, "I find it challenging. You have to play five or six different parts, and you have to give a real sense of storytelling. I was raised by a mother who read to us every night. I cherish the memory of her voice. In recording Patricia MacLachlan's work, I believe I am keeping alive a good tradition." Updike is both a recorder of his own work and an avid listener to colleagues: "I love to hear authors themselves reading their work. The voice, one presumes, is the voice they are hearing in their heads as they...