Wild At Heart

David Lynch’s follow-up to his cult hit, Blue Velvet (1986) is too polyphonous and fragmented to have the impact of that comparatively linear film but it is nevertheless, or even more so, a compelling film full of typically Lynchian bizarreness.

Written by the director and based (loosely, I gather) on a novel by Barry Gifford, it is a beautifully rendered slice of pulp fiction (it can readily be taken as a precursor to Tarantino's, Pulp Fiction, 1994) about a small-time hoodlum just out of jail, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and his girlfriend, Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) who decide to escape their dead-end existence in Southern Carolina (Cape Fear, to be exact) for a new life in California and are pursued by Lula’s mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother) a lush with criminal connections who has an obsessive dislike of Sailor because of some dark family secret.

What was in the original novel and what Lynch contributed I do not know but Lynch, aided by Fred Elmes’ superb cinematography invests just about every scene with carefully designed surreality and it is this more than the story that holds one’s attention – heavy metal music, Elvis, The Wizard of Oz, sex, violence and mental disintegration are woven into the basic plotline.

The cast are all excellent with Cage’s limited range perfectly contrasting with Lynch’s flair for excess. The latter particularly comes to the fore with the character of Bobby Peru, played with memorable repulsiveness by Willem Dafoe. The ending is perhaps a little too cheesy, mercilessly upping the ante on Hollywood's love of the happy ending albeit intended to be taken parodically (as is the billing and cooing, by the young lovers and Marietta and her two boyfriends, played by Harry Dean Stanton and J. E. Freeman),and shifting rather too abruptly the fatalistic tone of this marvellously stylized and inventive film.  

 

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