Lovers Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune (Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern) are separated when he goes to prison for the manslaughter of Bob Ray Lemon (Gregg Dandridge), a killer hired by Lula's alcoholic-nymphomaniac-psychotic mother Marietta (Diane Ladd). The audience I saw it with in 1990 ate up every outrageous bit of extreme content.ĭescribing the plot of Wild At Heart can't possibly convey its brightly colored outlaw-chic attitude. I don't think Wild At Heart adds up to as strong an experience as some of Lynch's other pictures, but when the end credits roll it definitely feels as if we've been on a major amusement park ride. And Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe approach their roles like creatures from another dramatic dimension. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern's rock 'n' roll- fueled erotic hysteria is purposely overstated, stylized to resemble a new kind of raw-nerve theater. When Wild At Heart creates a sense of danger or unease, it works like a charm. I know standard measures don't apply with Lynch, but he revels in sex content (mostly verbal, actually) of perfectly awful taste. David Lynch doesn't do things by half measures, and the obsessions that propel his best movies can generate fascinating, squeamish playgrounds of the unconscious. With its similarly fractured structure, Wild At Heart introduces dozens of characters that by all rights could spin off in their own series, or inhabit sidebar stories in an endless miniseries of operatic sleaze. 1990 was the same year that Lynch's great TV series Twin Peaks made its debut. If Blue Velvet enabled David Lynch to dig into his personal fantasies about a sordid middle-American underworld, 1990's Wild At Heart let him go wild with stylistic excess, in a tale of oversexed lovers on the run. Produced by Stever Golin, Monty Montgomery, Sigurjon Sighvatsson Written by David Lynch from a novel by Barry Gifford Freeman, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Calvin Lockhart, Isabella Rossellini, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie, Sherilyn Fenn, Marvin Kaplan, William Morgan Sheppard, Freddie Jones, John Lurie, Jack Nance, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Frances Bay, Sally Boyle, Sheryl Lee. Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, J.E.

Street Date Ap/ available through Screen Archives Entertainment / 29.95

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