I haven't seen BOXING HELENA, the debut of writer / director Jennifer Lynch, but I would like to.  By most accounts, it's more successful than her followup, which feels about how you would expect a film by a woman who grew up on the set of BLUE VELVET to feel.

Ultimately the film just felt uneven and not quite fully conceived, despite some strong performances and very intense moments.  Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond play a pair of FBI detectives investigating a string of murders in the middle of Nowheresville, America.  They encounter a group of imbecile cops that also happen to be abusive, along with the survivors of a recent murder spree: a little girl whose family was killed, and the drug-addicted young woman she seems to have bonded with (the scene-stealing Pell James).  

We begin to sense that something is wrong (whether intended by the director or not is unclear) when Sam Hallaway (Pullman) sets up the witnesses for their interviews: rather than taking his time and visiting them one-by-one, in person, he sets them up in three separate rooms (one of the crooked cops is also a witness), has them interviewed by different people, and simultaneously watches all three take place on a set of video monitors.  Huh?

From there the film loses a coherent point of view or structure, as we whimsically follow the different witnesses' stories, which kind of blur into a single recreation of a very drawn-out police pullover gone wrong.  The twist at the end of the film feels forced, but does lead to one of the film's most memorable moments, when, as the director described in the Q&A, the killer "bong hits" the victim's dying breath.

I would enjoy seeing Lynch direct a stronger script, because she does have a distinct style and sensibility that might be mesmerizing if lent to the right story.  Here, though, her talents can't overcome the lack of narrative compass.  While this style might have been adopted from her father's often obtuse plot lines, this film lacks the surrealism and thematic unity to weave the pieces together into anything more than a curiosity. 

Update on Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 10:35AM by brian scofield

An even more scathing review from indiewire.