WILD AT HEART (1990)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(One of the best films of the 90's)
'The whole world is wild at heart and weird on top'.
That statement could sum up director David Lynch's film career. It is a line delivered by Lula (Laura Dern), the sexy siren who has a thing for Sailor (Nicolas Cage), the ex-convict. He gets out of jail and is picked up by Lula as they embark on a truly strange odyssey where they find oily, snarly hit men and other unlikable louts like dishonorable thieves with bad teeth and so on. Their first stop on this ride is the hotel at the Cape Fear. Welcome to the wonderful world of David Lynch.
The crux of the film is the love story between Sailor and Lula, a match made in heaven who indulge in sex, cigarettes, bars, clubs, more sex and finally, a robbery. Lula's mother (Diane Ladd) hates Sailor and wishes him dead, especially for killing a hit man she hired eons ago. She refuses to have Sailor dominate her daughter's life again and asks the help of a cold-blooded killer (J.E. Freeman) to kill Sailor and a private detective, Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), she already sent to track Sailor! Meanwhile, Sailor and Lula travel from motel to motel meeting an assortment of characters along the way, including a hoodlum named Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) who has robbery on his mind. And then there is a discovery that Lula is pregnant. Plus, we see nude aides to a drug baron who goes by the name, Mr. Reindeer. Then there is some vomiting, an attempted rape, and a hapless victim of a car accident. Oh, yes and for more demented goings-on, there is a town named Big Tuna in Texas, a robbery involving hands and heads blown off, and a hysterically funny Crispin Glover as a disturbed individual who lets insects crawl in his butt. And there are all those "Wizard of Oz" homages in every scene. No Lynch film can be complete without a cameo by Jack Nance ("Eraserhead") as...well, you have to see it.
"Wild at Heart" is based on a novel by Barry Gifford and it could best be described as a zany, obscene, hellish variation on "Wizard of Oz" with songs by Elvis. It is consistenly funny, crude, violent and bizarre in its melding of film noir with a Western landscape and its near parodic overtones. But it is not serious noir - more like a pulp fiction carnival of raging emotions and pure malevolence. It is so melodramatic and over-the-top that it achieves a new low in cinematic crudity. And yet, as directed by David Lynch, it has such a breezy, non-stop attitude of anything goes in this weird world that it achieves a new kind of hip poetry. Considering it was released in 1990 and won the coveted Golden Palm award at Cannes, I see it as the precursor to Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" and Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" in terms of the high energy level, histrionic performances and the postmodern genre-bending of noir staples that find their own bizarre infusion from Lynch's own insane mind.
"Wild at Heart" is a fusion of all the cliches of the road movie genre with distinct Lynch-isms throughout. But this is no "Bonnie and Clyde" revisited - it is too strange and amoral for the mainstream movie crowd yet it is too watchable and chaotic to easily dismiss. Either way, it is one hell of a ride at the movies.
