Wild at Heart (1990)

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Directed by David Lynch.

Starring Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini.

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Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch's surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide

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Wild at Heart (1990, USA, David ...
by CinemaRian in CinemaRian Blog

hasn't rated it.

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"Wild at Heart is that guy at the party that has a joke that is genuinely funny, hilarious, in fact, but then repeats that joke over and over to everyone, until you just with he would go home. This movie would excellent at 70 or 80 minuets, but there's just not enough material here to stretch it out to two hours. The movie is a comedy, which is surprising considering the fact that it's directed by David Lynch, who is not generally known as being a wocka wocka kind of guy. But it's very funny indeed, which is why it's a shame it runs out of petrol in the second half. It's based on a novel by Barry Gifford, which I have not read, but assume to be an earnest telling of the odyssey of two rouge outlaws through the American west. Actually, I should say one rouge outlaw- the woman hasn't done anything illegal, but is being pursued by agents from her mother (Diane Ladd), who doesn't want her hanging around her ruffian boyfriend. The lovers are Sailor (Nicolas Cage), who acts like he's Elvi ... " [More]

Review by All Movie Guide

All Movie Guide

is neutral about it.

Appearing at the height of the director's popularity, thanks to the inescapable, if short-lived, Twin Peaks phenomenon, Wild at Heart is also the most stereotypically Lynchian of David Lynch's films, filled with striking visuals, surreal asides, pop-culture references, quirky characters, and oblique commentary on American life. As such, it will leave some viewers thrilled, others scratching their heads in annoyance. The open structure of the road film allows Lynch to indulge his most freewheeling instincts, and the results might be predictably mixed, but they're also frequently thrilling. If individual scenes themselves feel loosely connected, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern help hold the enterprise together by lending surprising poignancy to what could have been fairly cartoonish characters. Though not without its moments of unevenness, cumulatively, it feels like the perfect contemporary picaresque for the fast-food era. ~ Keith Phipps, All Movie Guide

Tags: Lynch , fantasies , lovelynch , snakeskin , wizardofz
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