Wild at Heart

source: Wild at Heart

Wild at Heart

So after seeing Lost Highway and finding it brilliant I wanted to see more of Lynch. This one had a rating of 7 so I check it out (as I tend to avoid movies with an IMDb rating of less than 7). I was disappointed. The creepiness of Big Tuna, Texas was about a 7, but most of the rest of the movie was a 2 at most. The acting is generally poor and the ending of this movie is just plain stupid. The only other good thing about this movie is Powermad. It's too bad they didn't continue. What a great, technical, speed metal band they were. I was left thinking about Lost Highway for days. This one I hope to forget.

A real stimulatingly offbeat exhibition from Lynch is the dark and wild backdrop of a romantically engaged traveling pair: "Sailor" who is on parole after committing a brutal murder, and "Lula" whose mother demands her to return from a spoiled trip to Texas with help from a detective. It's a twisted, artsy journey that is often repulsive and long to boot (and certainly not for the squeamish!), but fares inventive at a certain degree and boasts some of the strongest performances ever worked on a Lynch film, perhaps even in 1990. Cage's concert act and the magically rendered semi-ending are two classic acclaims put together in this moving cinematic collage. RATING: * * *

"Wild at Heart" is one deranged and twisted road trip as only David Lynch could bring you. It's so dark but at times funny too. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicholas Cage)are in love, but Lula's mother played by Laura Dern's real life mother Diane Ladd is evil. She doesn't want to see them together. Because of a murder, Sailor is finally released from prison. Lula's mom hires people to kill sailor. So Lula and Sailor go on a crazy road trip with dark and fellini like characters. William Defoe is unforgettable as the creepy and perverted Bobby Peru. The film almost received an X/NC-17 rating. It's easy to see why, it has lots of disturbing sex and violence. But than again that's a David Lynch trademark. This film is probably on my list of favorite road trip movies, next to Godard's "Weekend" (1967), "Thelma & Louise" and "Natural Born Killers". Both Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern give amazing performances. Dern's character Lula is the complete opposite of Sandy in "Blue Velvet", cause she's so wild and sexual. But Lula still has a naive child like charm. It seems that actor Nicholas Cage was born to play Sailor, a charming Elvis like ex convict who wants to change his ways. Also check out Berry Gifford's sequel to Wild at Heart, "Perdita Durango" (aka. dance with the devil) These films are both Wild at Heart and weird on Top!

I really like Nick Cage, so I ran out and rented "Wild At heart" as soon as I realized he was in it. What a mistake. This movie is one of the worst I have ever seen, hands down. So just how bad is it? Well.... Thinking perhaps I was hasty in hating it, I rented it again, years later. What a huh-YOODGE waste of time! You know how sometimes you keep watching an awful movie, hoping in the end it will somehow get a skosche better, or that at least something will be explained/justified, so that your time has not been wasted? Only then it never does, and as the credits roll you wonder out loud why you watched the thing? Well "Wild At Heart" is that kind of movie. Again thinking I must be wrong; no Nick Cage movie could be that ridiculously bad, I rented it again, and this time instructed my teenage kids to watch it, and tell me what they thought of it. I did this WITHOUT FIRST TELLING THEM< OR INDICATING IN ANY WAY, WHAT I ALREADY THOUGHT OF THE MOVIE. Well guess what. My daughter came back with eyes wide and lips wrinkled in disgusted amazement, proclaiming, "That's the worst movie I've ever seen!" Her older brother demanded of me why I made him watch such a terrible movie. There, see? no spoilers. Just rank opinion. Okay, here's one, or a few: The staring-at-the-vomit scene..we, the audience, are the ones made to do the staring... and returning to it again as the days go by and it gathers flies..now there's a treat. Oh, but it's an artsy movie! It's got a vomit-staring scene in it! It has references to the Wizard of Oz! It has a lady with an untweezed mono-brow in it! Yep, sure is artsy. How avant-garde. What a meaningful film. What a load of manure. Look, if you don't enjoy staring and staring at a splat of vomit, you won't like this movie. 'Nuff said.

David Lynch's films, although unsettling (intentionally) and occasionally off-putting, are usually very exciting to watch. He's such a visceral filmmaker, with an uncanny grasp of bringing personal nightmares right out into the daylight, that it sets an audience off. Viewers are immediately taken aback, and it takes a while to get used to his rhythm all over again whenever a new picture of his comes out. But "Wild at Heart" isn't even much of an attempt, and there's nothing gossamer or delicate about it, nothing mysterious; it seems to have been made by a truck driver, barreling his way through a traffic jam. Lynch's penchant for in-your-face vulgarity reaches its zenith; in fact, this is just vulgar bravado in search of a movie, with characters that are like fingernails raking a chalkboard. Lynch transposes "fairy tale" elements onto a mostly-familiar lovers-on-the-run story with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern playing the sweethearts, anti-heroes trying to evade Dern's mother (the degraded Diane Ladd) but, alas, leaving havoc in their wake. Overlong and crummy-looking, the film is twisted, foul-mouthed...and yet much worse, it is debased. It's another chapter in Lynch's fascination with the classes (trailer-trash life vs. suburbia), with the requisite desert psychos and doomed Lolitas, but I found it incredibly repetitive and not all that wild. * from ****

I much prefer Blue Velvet, maybe because it was new and shocking and original, whereas here Lynch seems to be copying himself, Nic Cage seems to be doing his faux-Elvis 'look at me all the time" schtick and Laura Dern just seems lost. The camera work is lovely, but to what end? It's kind of an empty story when all is said and done. As Emanuel Levy says in his book Cinema of Outsiders, "the shocks have little resonance, and the weirdness is trivial- the pictures hyperkinetic wildness is mostly on the surface, the images are elaborately conceived but meaningless."

Wild at Heart begins with an arresting scene of bloody violence by one of the two lead characters, Sailor Ripley, and this immediately grabs our attention. After this he hooks up with his lover, Lula, who he fiercely protects, and goes on a bizarre road trip into the deep south of the states, while avoiding Lula's mother, played with passion by a deservedly Oscar-nominated Diane Ladd, who has an obsessive hatred for Sailor. They meet an assortment of weird people, especially Bobby Peru, and also Perdita Durango, who has appeared recently in a film with her name as the title, also written by Barry Gifford. It is classic David Lynch, with a homage type theme to the Wizard of Oz. It has the sensuality and eroticism later seen in Lost Highway, the violence and gore, the head sequence after the bank robbery being graphic, and a general uneasiness throughout. But it is a darkly humorous and transfixing piece.

Outrageous! This is another sick-but-fascinating David Lynch film, maybe his sickest, although I've never seen Eraserhead. The most interesting feature of this strange movie, I think, was the weird characters, one after the other. Make that ultra-weird.....and the strangest of them all is "Bobby Peru," played by Willem Dafoe. In all my years of movie watching, I think "Bobby Peru" still has to rank in the top five of the creepiest characters. He is so outrageously disgusting and perverted you just have to laugh out loud at him. In fact, "outrageous" might be the best word to describe this film, characters and all. This wild and entertaining film sometimes makes me shake my head in disgust that I own it, and at other times makes me just laugh out loud at the absurdity of it. You really have to have a dark sense of humor to appreciate much of it. I do, to some degree....enough to keep viewing this. Nicholas Cage is particularly fun to watch and provides most of the laughs. Laura Dern is also convincing as a trailer-trash-type. If you want a clue on why Dern would play such a sleazy role, check out her real-life mom in this film, Diane Ladd, who plays her mother in the movie. It looks like Mom passed on her wholesome values. As with some other Lynch films, the music is outstanding: just a great soundtrack. I bought the CD to this a year after first seeing the movie, and I've always enjoyed it. And, another Lynch trait that certainly is here is the excellent visual style, which is enhanced by the widescreen DVD. So, if you are looking for an outrageous two hours and you aren't easily shocked or offended, this would be a film to consider.