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| Released: |
1990 |
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| Genre: |
OVERRATED
ROMANCE
THRILLER
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Length: |
127 |
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Young lovers Sailor and Lula (Nicolas Cage, pictured right, and Laura Dern, left) go on the run from Lula's murderous mom (Diane Ladd, auditioning belatedly for the lead in Mommie Dearest).
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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On their way across the States, they are pursued by mom's wimpish boyfriend (Harry Dean Stanton, underacting to the point of invisibility) and various hired killers, notably Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe with overlarge teeth and underdeveloped motivation).
The message is not so very different from that of Lynch's previous, more impressive success, Blue Velvet: that just below the surface of America, there is sadism, necrophilia, mayhem, madness and murder. But whereas Blue Velvet established normality and then subverted it, Wild At Heart offers such a distorted, vacuous version of reality from the start that it's never convincing, and rapidly becomes a bore.
Blue Velvet explored the dark side of sexuality in a way which was sensuous but disturbing; in Wild at Heart, Lynch falls into the trap of voyeurism himself. The sex scenes between Sailor and Lula are straightforward soft porn. The scene where Lula invites rape has no foundation in her character.
Lynch's use of colour is often inspired, and his use of sound is always entertainingly bizarre - a legacy of his background in animation, where all sound is artificial and dubbed on afterwards. And there are a few funny jokes, albeit of an extremely sick nature.
But Lynch's usual faults are in abundance. Some of the sound effects and close-ups are just pretentious and repetitive; the actors don't appear to have been directed at all; and the continuity errors are glaring (a town which is empty of cars one moment is jammed with them a second later). The narrative structure is - even for a road movie - self-indulgent and shambolic. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
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