The trouble is that none of them resonates especially well, and thus we end up with neither compelling intrigue nor drama.Īnd yet there is an awful appeal to the picture, extruded and perversely insistent.
The fundamental plot is rather salacious and could have been developed as a mystery or thriller, but Lynch focuses much more on the characters and their quirks. Along the way they are dogged by increasingly outré hitmen (including a repulsively perfect Willem Dafoe) but still find time for plenty of high-kick dancing and motel room sex.
(‘ Lost Highway’ another.) Based on a novel by Barry Gifford, the film follows an Elvis-loving outlaw, Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage), and his young girlfriend Lula Fortune (a young and willowy Laura Dern) on a parole-breaking trek through the South. Sometimes an entire film will become superfluous, recognizably kin to Lynch’s other films but nothing more than a burst of sound and fury. Superfluity itself becomes an essential component of his milieu, as in ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘ Blue Velvet’, or ‘ Mulholland Drive’.īut this approach doesn’t always work. He may not always (ever?) explain himself to the audience, but at his best we get the sense that each bizarre idiosyncrasy or hokey tangent has some essential purpose. The kind of director who will ‘build’ dust bunnies and install them himself beneath a radiator on-set even though the camera never looks below knee-level.
The extent to which David Lynch could expect a regular civilian viewer of Wild at Heart to know about any of these textual and organic connections is: 0 the extent to which he cares whether anybody got it or not is apparently: also 0.DAVID LYNCH is a director of meticulous consideration and invention. The Fugitive Kind happens to be the film version of Tennessee Williams's little-known Orpheus Descending, a play which in 1960, enjoying a new vogue in the wake of Lumet's film adaptation, ran Off-Broadway in NYC and featured Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's parents, who met and married while starring in this play. The fact that Cage's performance in Wild at Heart strongly suggests either Brando doing an Elvis imitation or vice versa is not an accident, nor is the fact that both Wild at Heart and The Fugitive Kind use fire as a key image, nor is the fact that Sailor's beloved snakeskin jacket - "a symbol of my belief in freedom and individual choice" - is just like the snakeskin jacket Brando wore in The Fugitive Kind. Wild at Heart itself, for all its heavy references to The Wizard of Oz, is actually a pomoish remake of Sidney Lumet's 1959 The Fugitive Kind, which starredĪnna Magnani and Marion Brando.
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