Word: derne
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...movie pits the passions of the '60s love and drug culture against the conventions of small-town America, the obligatory collegiate life of demonstration against the rigid demands of a fearful but patriotic older generation. Within the families, though, Scott must deal with a stern, unfeeling father (Bruce Dern) and a disenchanted, prayerful mother (Mariette Hartley), while Ralph must deal with his own widowed mother (Joanna Cassidy...
...Wahter ya'll lookin' at, boys? She ain't mah neighbor's wife or nothin'... where's that dern stage...
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...
...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...