Web posted on:
Tuesday, August 17, 1999 3:19:31 PM EST

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- I remember hearing a hilarious song once by a band called King Missile. The song consisted of an endlessly repeated minimalist riff and some guy in the background shouting, "Hey! I'm Philip Glass! Look at me! I'm Philip Glass!"

Michael and Mark Polish's "Twin Falls Idaho" is the film version of that song, except the filmmakers stand very much in the foreground while shouting that they're David Lynch.

Although their examination of half-lovestruck conjoined twins (one of them is in love; the other isn't) is sometimes more moving than it has any right to be, the Polish brothers have apparently never met a Lynch gesture they didn't like.

Their twins (Michael and Mark also play the main characters) live in a dank, photogenically filthy hotel designed and shot like the suffocating sets of Lynch's "Eraserhead" (1977). The main female character is a sleek sexual victim. The soundtrack is occasionally filled with ominous, unexplained rumblings. Lights suddenly flicker off and on just to make things more bizarre.

And the twins, while viewed by most people as freaks, spew heroically poignant insights like they're a Double McElephant Man with cheese.

It's no surprise, then, that the film operates on a Lynchian success ratio: two parts evocative to eight parts pretentious twaddle. The Polish twins -- they're really twins, though not really attached at the sternum -- play Blake and Francis Falls, two handsome brothers who've nonetheless had a tough life because of their unmercifully close ties to each other.

The film follows their odd "relationship" with Penny (Michele Hicks), a model-turned-hooker who at first is appalled when they call her to their hotel for a birthday visit, but sticks around to help out when Francis suddenly gets sick. Penny is ... um ... very open-minded, so she soon finds herself falling in love with the serene, sweet, complex Blake, who delivers halting little speeches that sound like they were lifted from a book of haiku at a Hallmark card shop.

Aside from a haunting physical confrontation between the brothers, the best scenes are when Penny quizzes Blake about the mechanics of living with another person literally attached to you.

No one can deny that certain questions arise when you consider conjoined twins. How can two minds move through the world in one body? Does each twin crave a conventional form of privacy that they'll never get to know? These questions do get asked, and Blake's delicate answers are sometimes rather emotional. Sometimes, though, isn't the same thing as always.

Although the point is to humanize the twins, the Polish brothers often undermine their own intentions. The opening sequences are the most questionable, with murky lighting and tawdry settings evoking outright horror more than anything else. The point, of course, is to eventually move the audience past its initial misperception of the characters, but off-kilter elements get pushed in your face too often and for too long.

The hotel, for instance, isn't just dirty, it's a production designer's grunge dream house. And the elevator operator is right out of a Coen brothers comedy; he stares straight ahead and makes monotone pronouncements while Penny gawks at how "strange" it all is. There's also a guy in the room next door who's constantly heard performing marriage ceremonies.

Even more unsettling, he later shows up in the person of Garrett Morris. (At least he doesn't stumble over every third line of dialogue like he used to do on "Saturday Night Live.")

Other characters float in and out of the mix, including the twins' denial-soaked mother (Leslie Ann Warren, in a terribly written role) and one of Penny's clients, a mysterious doctor played by Patrick Bauchau.

But most of the non-twin screen time belongs to Hicks, and she can't act at all. Not a lick. She looks great slinking around in slit skirts and bad-girl eye makeup, but her line readings sound like she doesn't believe a word of what she's saying.

Then again, maybe she shouldn't. The character has only about three ideas, and she's forced to repeat them every time she opens her mouth. There's a lot of hokum spread around about her fascination with the twins springing from her own sense of isolation, but even a looker deserves to be lonely if she's this vacant.

There's also a reliance on convenient situations, and the twins seem amazingly well socialized for being so privately tormented. Both screenwriting shortcuts are openly displayed when Penny invites the guys to a photographer friend's costume party on Halloween night. Wouldn't you know it, this is the only night of the year when Blake and Francis can travel unnoticed. What a stroke of luck.

And aren't they ready to lunge at the chance to attend a big party full of strangers, never mind that they usually spend their evenings huddled under the bed sheets in belly-to-belly existential anguish?

The most significant achievement here is that a movie with a double-bodied main character isn't even half good.

"Twin Falls Idaho" is cloudy in mind as well as image. There's much talk about sex and physiology, and it's pretty troubling when the twins fall ill. Meant to make you uneasy, it's mostly uneasy to sit through. Rated R. 110 minutes. Unfortunately, Al Green does not croon "Let's Stay Together" over the credits.