WILD AT HEART
David Lynch’s lusty crime tale of two young lovers on the run was a little too tongue in cheek for my taste. We’ve got an Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as the passionate couple, running from Dern’s mother (Diane Ladd) who’s intent on keeping them apart. There are reasons for this that become more and more clear through flashbacks, but ultimately it doesn’t add up to much.
Why not? Well, I guess because I just didn’t buy any of it. Like a lot of David Lynch’s stuff, WILD AT HEART is over the top to the point of being a cartoon. We’re faced with frank depictions of violence and sexuality, but it’s all perpetrayed on and by characters we’re not given much chance to take seriously.
That’s not to say there aren’t funny moments, mostly thanks to Cage’s great comic timing as a young hood who’s obsessed with Elvis.
The movie is not lacking in style, that’s for sure, and it was clearly influential on a lot of what was to come in the rest of the 90s (Tarantino). To be fair. if I had seen it when I was told to see it by my buddy Brocker when I was 15, I probably would have liked it. But now that I’m an old man, I dunno.
The movie’s greatest strength is the cast, all of whom deliver great performances better than the movie itself. Aside from the perfectly cast Cage, Dern and Ladd we’ve also got Harry Dean Stanton, Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini and Crispin Glover.
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