David Lynch (1990)

‘This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top,’ says Lula, the heroine of David Lynch’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner.  The problem with Lula’s and the film’s perception of the world is that it doesn’t include normality – which Lynch’s bizarre imagination and humour need to feed off.  In Blue Velvet, he offered an unsettling perspective on the familiar and innocuous and explored the dark, fantastic underside of small town suburbia.  The eccentric possibilities of the people in his television serial Twin Peaks depend on their inhabiting a distinctive but credible setting – which their obsessions then transform into something rich and strange.  In Wild at Heart, the characters’ weirdness and wildness are both upfront, and jostling for attention:  there’s nothing latent.  The environment is monotonously oppressive and lacks shading and mystery (except for the shots of a hypnotically beautiful inferno or of sunlit white houses against bright blue skies).  Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), the young hedonists who are trying to evade the various malign influences of this world – chiefly Lula’s mother (Diane Ladd, who is Dern’s real-life mother) – are too physically tough and self-confident to seem much threatened by it – or to engage the audience.  Although Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, Cage and Dern don’t connect emotionally either with each other or with the viewer.  It’s shocking that Lula comes to life only when she’s sexually humiliated.

Most of the other characterisations (Diane Ladd’s especially) are strenuously grotesque; none is surprising.  David Lynch takes bits and pieces of pop and film artefacts and stereotypes (Elvis, The Wizard of Oz, road/chase movies) to create a texture but he seems to keep losing interest in them.  His predilection for dynamically morbid imagery is merely repellent here because it’s disconnected from any mediating intelligence that experiences and interprets the outbursts of violence (as Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey does in Blue Velvet).  Much of Wild at Heart still has the unmistakeable look of a Lynch film; it mostly has the feel of a parody of one.  With Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, J E Freeman, Freddie Jones.  Angelo Badalamenti’s score is fluent but no more expressive than the images that it accompanies allow.  Screenplay by Lynch from a novel by Barry Gifford.

[1990s]