Review of The Elephant Man (1980) by Dimitris L — 20 Jan 2011

David Lynch has had a career with ups and downs, troubles finding funding for films, being a veritable box office leper for a couple decades now, nostalgia is invaded for this wonderful and horrific film that emerged from 1980, signaling the ending bang of the Golden Age of filmmaking tha had blossomed throughout the mid 1960s till the later years of the 1970s, The Elephant Man is dramatic, personal, sincere, cruel, unfair, tragic, wonderful, and many other adjectives I could pile on and on just to basically say that this, in a way, captures the feel of life as a whole with its many complexities and ever altering states of being.

John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins give the audience absolutely amazing performances nursed by Lynch's direction and screenplay (shared with Bergen and DeVore). The choice to film it in black and white was a complete option by Lynch, and I will say with a degree of certainty that if this film was shot in color, it wouldn't be nearly half as effective as it was.

An overall conventional way of telling a story, with Lynch's trademark surrealism and love of confounding the audience, this film has worked its way into the finer calibers of filmmaking.