Film review by Kevin Patterson
"Wild At Heart" * * 1/2 R, 1990 Written and directed by David Lynch. Based on a novel by Barry Gifford. Starring Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern.
"Wild At Heart" is at its roots a pretty typical story of runaway lovers: Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage), an ex-convict, and his girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern) drive across the country trying to avoid Lula's cruel mother and the hitmen she has sent after Sailor as well as Sailor's parole officers. Along the way, they stop in the usual seedy backwater towns where they stay in the usual flea-bag hotels and confront the usual perverted psychos. The premise may not have been original, but it still could have made for a provocative film if it had been executed properly.
Well, bad news: it wasn't, at least not consistently. Perhaps after the success of "Blue Velvet," screenwriter and director David Lynch thought he could make any story involving sex and violence into a compelling and powerful film, and there are certainly plenty of both in this movie. But what made Blue Velvet Êwork so well was its mind's-eye view through its lead character Jeffrey Beaumont, as he descends from quiet small-town innocence into a dark, frightening world and ultimately fights his way back out. In "Wild At Heart," however, the characters of Sailor and Lula are not developed to that extent. They just seem like two more crazies along the way, albeit likeable and relatively benign crazies ("relatively benign" meaning "not twisted and psychotic" in the context of this film). The story is presented as mostly a curiosity, a far cry from the poignancy of "Blue Velvet." As a result, a few of the more graphic scenes seem pretty gratuitous, as if Lynch were being risque simply for the sake of being risque and not because the story was driving him in any particular direction.
Furthermore, Lynch's talent for surreal moods and downright absurd behavior is sometimes misused here, as much of the Lynchian weirdness operates at a tangent to the main story rather than as part of it. It is as if, having shot all the scenes most essential to the basic plot, someone told him he had another thirty minutes of film left and he used it all on quirky but somewhat irrelevant scenes like a delirious car accident victim looking for her keys and purse as she bleeds to death. There is another scene in which the camera lingers on some slowly undulating curtains on a balcony - a Lynch trademark - but we never see what is going on behind those curtains, nor does it seem to serve any purpose in setting the mood for what happens next. Watching "Wild At Heart" is almost like watching a failed attempt to make a "David Lynch movie," as if a novice director set out to copy Lynch's imagery and then didn't know what to do with it.
As a result, what we have in "Wild At Heart" is a film that, while somewhat disappointing and a bit unfocused, is not without its merits - Sailor and Lula certainly make for entertaining and sympathetic leads, and theirs is if nothing else something of an uplifting love story in that they somehow manage to make it through what can only be described as the road trip from hell. And, however misguided Lynch's use of his usual absurdism here, it does lead to some genuinely funny moments. In one sequence, Lula, disgusted by all the bad news of murders and violence on the radio, stops the car, hysterically demanding that Sailor put in a music cassette as the two of them break into a goofy, chaotic dance routine on the side of the road. Lynch favorite Jack Nance also makes an appearance, delivering a drawling, inane discourse on the psychological nuances of talking about dogs ("Mentally, you picture my dog . . . but, I have not told you the type dog which I have!").
Perhaps this movie is best viewed not as serious art, like most of Lynch's other films, but as nothing more than a quirky and occasionally stomach-churning adventure movie that, while not very sophisticated, is still decent entertainment if you have nothing else to do for a couple of hours.
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