David Lynch's WILD AT HEART (1990)

My wife hasn't seen this yet. Time for a good long cuddle is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom... well, individuality with my wife.

Bobby Peru. Like the country.

I always enjoyed the hell out of this film, and yet in the couple of times I watched it in the past- once at home and once on 35mm (thanks IFC Center)- something kept me from outright **loving** it. And I still acknowledge this is not perfect and has some bloat. Much as I am always a stan for anything Harry Dean Stanton, and he is good in his role here, his sub-plot of chasing down the Lovers on the Run could be cut out and there would be little lost in the *story* of the film (story, with Lynch, I know please hold back your laughter at me), leading up to an (admittedly gnarly, off putting) scene with Grace Zabriskie and some epic eyebrows which she shares with *sister Isabella Rossellini. And there's a scene with Crispin Glover that is all about flashback that leads to a lesson which is... huh?

I have to accept that this is imperfect.... since the third time was the charm for me. My snake-skin jacket is on fire! ::cut to headbanger ball rock jam that transitions into a sweet Elvis jam::

Wild at Heart is a massive success at what Lynch (and by extention Barry Gifford and his book) went for which was to get deep into the most lurid parts of melodramas and pulp crime stories and... find what was real in the world. There is giant swing after giant swing here and there Lynch loves the crude and lewd and what gets into your face. It isn't a put-on to me or acting like he is too clever though; it is someone who has read plenty of pulps and seen the soapiest day time television (or maybe he had it on in the background at his workshop, I dunmo), as we have one scummy character after another, from Freeman as **Marcelles Santos as the suited-up thug that leads Sailor into going on the run with Lula, to everyone in Big Tuna who are the underbelly of the underbelly.... while Sailor and Lula are trying to make it in this crazy world.

Cage and Dern are playing it to a heightened level, but they are never unbelievable in how they are together. I forgot just how many scenes are just the two of them talking quietly in bed, sometimes saying something "cute" or making a lightly romantic gesture or something that leads to steaming hot sex (but I mean his thing talks to her, right), and they come across things like the car crash with Not Audrey Horne and it really shocks them to their core. There are some secrets that will be revealed in the dark of the night and moments like that elevate the stakes of the relationship. I love so much that this starts at a place to hook the audience into the violence and sex and then Lynch ways "Hey, wait, I want to feel like I'm with real people, even if this is is a giant cartoon... let's rock!"

I'll even go as far as to say that Nicolas Cage, at least compared to many of his more notoriously grandiose performances, is gentle and nuanced in his performance, like look how much he's listening and having reactions where he gets to... underplay(?!) And keep in mind he is acting opposite Willem Dafoe as Bobby fucking Peru and Diane Ladd and just everything she is doing with her psychotic Red-Faced Mother would-be superior (a study in a sort of failed Ego-Libido in action). But this is furthermore one of Laura Dern's most emotionally gut-wrenching turns for what she is asked to do; this is a character who has gone through many forms of trauma, and has a dead dad (he sure burns and burns), and at the elevated emotional plane this is at she is so real while playing into the cliche.

(**I'll make one footnote here actually- I have to wonder if how seismic this made an impression on a young Quentin Tarantino - this already after Blue Velvet shook him to his core as an influence on his workb- and seeing it with fresher and older eyes it just seems like the mode of this storytelling and character work... Marsellus/Marcellus Wallace. And then Lost Highway was arguably Lynch's own response to Tarantino, so funny how that worked out. But that idea of playing so much into the Cliche that it comes back around is just finding the reality of the convention that the filmmakers are playing is so powerful and moving when done well. This is).

Wild at Heart goes for the jugular with its comedy, with its momentous pathos, and with how every master shot and countless close ups have the charged power of a director who is so great not because he worked out every detail to the minutest second (I'm sure he drew out much of this both with pens and sticks in whatever black mud he had in his workshop), but because he brought in all of his collaborators to make it even better and darker.  Frederick Elmes has such intensive lighting and cinematography; Badalamenti puts you on edge the moment those drums and the dirty guitar comes up; beautifully ugly production design.

 It is a romantic story, and Lynch and his two stars go for the romance even while both actors have tenacious chemistry (it is not as explicit as the violence, but it is some of the most erotic stuff he shot outside of Mulholland Drive).  It's about surly low lifes and criminals who make someone like Sailor realize how he is almost objectively a better person than them and the awful energy of a Bobby Peru, not the most evil Lynch antagonist but certainly the sleaziest.

 And for all of its hard-driven rock and roll violent set pieces and machines, it is so fervently with the women in its world, or at least Lula and her sexual assault as a child and (as shown in a sobering and harrowing several seconds) abortion. Lula can only make it in the world with someone like Sailor, who she knows could go either way in life, and Sailor needs her just as much.

There is so much dense emotion with them and their world I can't believe I only mention now the Wizard of Oz stuff. That should be the material - not from the book mind you - that doesn't fit, and yet that too does since, after all, this is all about how characters try to and succeed and sometimes fail to live up to the cliches that they have made for themselves (again, Tarantino and post modernism creeping in). And it is just so so... sweet when Sheryl Lee appears as that Good Witch to send Sailor on his way after all the darkness we have seen and the "Bad" Witch that is Diane Ladd.

What can I say, this is a flawed gem, but still one of Lynch's masterpieces.

(*Fun fact, speaking of Tarantino, this had a spin-off made of the Rossellini character many years later and played by Rosie Perez in a movie called Dance with the Devil, aka Perdita Durango, and that's pretty great and underrated as well).