Review: Wild at Heart (1990)

Wild at Heart (1990)

Rated R

Score: 5 out of 5

Wild at Heart is a quintessential David Lynch movie, a film that's not as weird as his reputation suggests but gets treated as such anyway (including by Popcorn Frights, who hosted a screening this past Friday night) because he often uses a lot of stylish camera tricks and goes for a very offbeat tone. The "non-linear storytelling" is really just a very liberal use of flashbacks, and beneath the stylization, the story is very coherent, even if it doesn't hit the beats you'd normally expect. What it is, rather, is a film that carries the substance one would normally expect from Lynch, a melancholy exploration of Americana as our protagonists take a long road trip across the South that evokes a dark subversion of The Wizard of Oz. It's the kind of movie where you can immediately understand why a musician like Lana Del Rey seemingly built her entire persona around Lynch's films, as I found myself immediately drawn in by its modern-day Southern gothic atmosphere, its captivating lead performances by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, and the mounting sense of dread as two seemingly star-crossed lovers take a long road trip and encounter a number of increasingly weird characters along the way. I've heard that it's divisive, regarded as either one of Lynch's best films or one of his worst with not a whole lot of middle ground between them, but as somebody for whom this was his introduction to Lynch's films, I can say that I'm certainly intrigued, and eager to seek out his other movies.

The film opens in Cape Fear, North Carolina with one of our two protagonists, Sailor Ripley, getting targeted for murder by Marietta Fortune, the wealthy, snobbish mother of his girlfriend Lula, only for him to brutally beat the assassin she hired to death in front of a large crowd at a fancy party. Two years later, with Sailor out on parole (the court judged that, while excessive, he was acting in self-defense), he and Lula immediately hook up again, much to the horror of her mother, who sees him as a sleazeball who's corrupting her daughter (and also wanted him for herself). Thus begins a long road trip as Sailor and Lula drive west in a vintage Ford Thunderbird, breaking parole, while unbeknownst to them, Marietta hires the private detective (and her on-and-off boyfriend) Johnny Farragut to retrieve Lula -- and also hires the vicious gangster Marcello Santos to outright kill Sailor.

The plot of the film is largely in Marietta's side of the story, but the actual meat of the film concerns Sailor and Lula, a pair of young lovebirds on the run. Everybody involved with the film has described them as two halves of one character, and that is how they function, a young couple deeply in love who won't let the disapproval of Lula's mother get in the way of that love. While Nicolas Cage does get one of his famous freakouts at the start of the film, for most of it he's channeling Elvis Presley and James Dean, and not just because he's in a T-Bird and sings the King's romantic songs to Lula; from his accent to his snakeskin jacket, he projects an image of '50s cool that even the film itself admits is kind of a put-on, but it's one that he makes work. Laura Dern, meanwhile, was both beautiful and challenging as Lula, the rebellious daughter of an aristocratic Southern belle who's seen up-close the hypocrisy and hidden horrors of her upbringing that you're not supposed to talk about in polite company. And together, I fully bought their love story. Not only was it hot as hell (fair warning: there's a lot of sex in this movie), the two characters at the center were compelling thanks to Cage and Dern's performances, such that I wanted to see them together and quickly came to despise Willem Dafoe's character in his brief but instantly despicable role. In real life, you know that a relationship like theirs shouldn't work, but on the screen here, it did anyway. The ending of this film was a difficult one that could've easily turned corny, but it felt earned.

The supporting characters, too, were outstanding and prevented the film from just becoming a meandering mess, the big one being Diane Ladd as Lula's mother Marietta. We're shown early on that Marietta wanted Sailor for herself, the implication being that she's jealous of her daughter's relationship with him and has decided that, if she can't have him, no one can. Further revelations of her past with Sailor only drive home just how disturbed she actually is, especially her history with J. E. Freeman's Santos and Harry Dean Stanton's Farragut, the men she sends after Sailor and Lula, and how Sailor's life intersected with hers in the past. Willem Dafoe, meanwhile, is only in the film briefly, but his character Bobby Peru immediately steals the show once Sailor and Lula meet him in a small town in Texas, an absolute scumbag of a criminal whose entire time on screen is spent doing, planning for, or implying terrible things. The whole movie is filled with the kinds of little characters who you might encounter in these kinds of small towns, as well as minor figures in the characters' lives, played by a host of character actors like Crispin Glover, Sherilyn Fenn, and Isabella Rossellini. "It's about the journey, not the destination" is a cliché, but it absolutely applies here: I felt like I was on a road trip with Sailor and Lula as they journeyed across America, blissfully unaware of Marietta's goons coming for them.

Lynch, for his part, does a great job of capturing that dreamlike feel on the screen. His American South is a land of lonely roads, rock music, and interesting sights that you might not experience anywhere else. The brief plot detour involving the people who crashed on the side of the highway, for instance, may not have had any real plot purpose, but it did a lot of work building up that sense of dread as you began to suspect that Sailor and Lula's journey was not going to end well for them. It was stylish without feeling stylized, a film that made great use of the rural South from the forests back east to the dust of West Texas, and it got me in the feeling of taking a long journey to nowhere in particular, reminding me of some of the sights I saw last year driving from Florida to Utah.

The Bottom Line

It's a hard movie to describe, and it's not for everyone, but I absolutely adored Wild at Heart. I'm now eager to seek out the rest of David Lynch's filmography thanks to this beautiful, captivating dark romance, a film where even the few flaws I could come up with felt like they were put in there for deliberate effect. Check it out.