Wild at Heart (1990)
Directed by David Lynch
Young lovers Sailor and Lula hit the road to start a new life together away from the wrath of Lula’s deranged, disapproving mother, who has hired a team of hitmen to cut the lovers’ surreal honeymoon short.
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9 films that influenced Wild at Heart
What critics say influenced Wild at Heart
Other movies have incorporated The Wizard of Oz into their fabric, notably Woody Allen's Annie Hall , Martin Scorsese's After Hours and David Lynch's Wild at Heart , not to mention the popular book/Broadway play Wicked, which tells the story from the Wicked Witch's perspective.
Lynch has also felt compelled to douse the movie (which took the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes this year) with an unending flood of references to "The Wizard of Oz."
Though far from an intellectual exercise, the film fiddles consciously with big cultural archetypes—Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and The Wizard Of Oz, among others—and with capital-letter depictions of Good and Evil.
Wild at Heart takes the archetypal road movie and adds inventive variations including sexual intrigue, ritual murder, pyromania, dirty talk, an ensemble cast familiar from "Twin Peaks," identification with media icons, and references to The Wizard of Oz.
What Lynch seems to have been going for is a sort of white-trash variation on "The Wizard of Oz" -- one that's been left out in the sun to rot and fester and run lousy with maggots.
But among all the pop-cultural referencing laced throughout Wild At Heart, the most important, noticeable, and constant allusions in the film are the numerous ones pertaining to The Wizard of Oz, with many pieces of dialogue referring to Sailor and Lula’s journey using terminology and imagery from the classic film.
Blazing away amidst all these stock and semi-stock figures is Diane Ladd's scene-stealing Marietta Fortune, who gives Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate some fierce competition as the screen's wickedest Mama.
Later Lynch would expose the subterranean evil of Capra-esque America in 1986’s Blue Velvet , recast The Wizard of Oz among the riotously criminal milieu of 1990’s Wild at Heart , and offer us a circuitous journey down Los Angeles’s famed Mulholland Drive in 2001 (although you won’t be there to admire the view).
At his best -- in "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and the pilot for "Twin Peaks" -- Lynch achieves a fragile, almost godlike tone, where comedy and tragedy bleed together, and irony and passionate, obsessive sincerity are mixed in precisely equal portions.
Lynch is that deranged filmmaker behind "Eraserhead", "Blue Velvet", "Lost Highway" and the "Twin Peaks" series.
More comically intended than "Blue Velvet" and certainly less restrained than his TV series "Twin Peaks," "Wild at Heart" is writer-director Lynch at the most bizarre he's let himself be since "Eraserhead," his first and most experimental movie.
The indie-filmmaking spree that fueled festivals like Sundance wouldn’t have been popular without films like his own Blue Velvet and Eraserhead inspiring many young up-and-coming filmmakers.
What has always been so seductive about Lynch's ''wildness'' especially in Eraserhead and his 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet is that it doesn't announce itself.
Like their counterparts in Nick Ray’s They Live by Night, Sailor and Lula “were never properly introduced to the world we live in.”
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It is also almost certainly the most self-conscious entry in that cycle of films that comprises Gun Crazy, Badlands , and True Romance (and its bastard cousin, Natural Born Killers).
Sailor's snakeskin jacket is straight out of Tennessee Williams, and Cage's performance is pure "Jailhouse Rock."
As those lovers, in this explosive, hipster spin on "Bonnie and Clyde," Cage and Dern are right on the money.
Among the many Bonnie and Clyde-style road movies in cinema history, David Lynch’s 1990 film, Wild at Heart, is unsurprisingly the weirdest.
Since "Blue Velvet" and "Wild at Heart" (1990), Lynch's work has become increasingly detached from the conventions of storytelling, with films like "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive" playing a cat and mouse game with audiences' expectations (the exception to this policy was, of course, "The Straight Story").
Laura Dern portrays the good girl â prim, proper, and much different from her character in Lynch's Wild at Heart.
“Wild at Heart” was lost on my early twentysomething self, and I was completely confused by “Blue Velvet” when I watched it as a teenager.
Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival (where it beat out, among others, Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac, Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou and Clint Eastwood's White Hunter Black Heart), Wild at Heart was writer-director David Lynch's first feature since his 1986 cause célèbre Blue Velvet.
Sailor is emphatically more oddball, more animal, less sheltered than the Kyle MacLachlan character in Blue Velvet, and Laura Dern is playing an obviously more capacious spirit than the one she contributed to the same, earlier film.
At his best -- in "Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet" and the pilot for "Twin Peaks" -- Lynch achieves a fragile, almost godlike tone, where comedy and tragedy bleed together, and irony and passionate, obsessive sincerity are mixed in precisely equal portions.
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I can't pretend that I "enjoyed" watching Wild at Heart in the same way as I did The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, or Mulholland Drive.
Lynch can actually do conventional storytelling rather well, as evidenced not only in numerous episodes of his most famous work, TV’s Twin Peaks, but also with Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, and the somewhat aptly titled The Straight Story.
David Lynch ("Eraserhead"/"The Straight Story"/"Wild at Heart") helms this accessible and emotionally moving film of a Victorian surgeon who rescues (for questionable reasons) a severely disfigured English man (a head twice the average size, a twisted spine, an inability to lie down without risking asphyxiation and a useless right arm) who is mistreated in childhood and while surviving as a carnival show freak.