Review of Wild at Heart (1990) by Timothy M — 27 Dec 2010

This particular David Lynch movie is very David Lynch-y indeed. His films are hard to talk about, because you can't always tell whether something is just bad filmmaking or if it's supposed to be that way (I suspect it's almost always the latter).

I have no idea how big movie studios keep giving this man money when he consistently makes films with no commercial appeal at all; on some level, I have to give the man credit for the way he keeps pulling his weird movies off.

That doesn't mean I have to like them, however. This one won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in its year, and I have no idea how. On the surface, it's a postmodern film noir/road movie about two young lovers on the run from hitmen, but that doesn't really convey what this movie is really about, if it's about anything.

While I can see individual scenes and say, oh how clever you're being David Lynch, by the time the movie reaches the end, I wonder what the point was, why anyone made this movie. You know it's a weird movie when Nicolas Cage is the most normal person in it.

His performance is ok given what he had to work with, and Laura Dern's performance was fine too. Other talented actors appear in it, but they are all essentially reduced to playing grotesques in Lynch's freakshow.

Diane Ladd shockingly got an Oscar nomination for this movie; she plays the part with great intensity, but the things Lynch makes her do are just so humiliating and weird and inexplicable. Willem Dafoe, wearing the most repulsive fake teeth in movie history, plays a thoroughly hateful character.

Isabella Rosellini and Crispin Glover also have bizarre little parts. Only Harry Dean Stanton gets to play a recognizably human character, and he gets shot in the head. The whole movie is shot in these pukey neon orange and green colors that make it ugly and unpleasant to look at.

Although I can respect that Lynch might be one of the most self-consciously artistic and distinctive directors in the country, at the end of this movie I felt as I have at the end of most of the other movies of his I've seen (except for The Elephant Man, which is indeed good): alienated, vaguely uncomfortable, and confused.