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Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage in the hideously empty Wild at Heart |
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Nicolas Cage (Sailor Ripley), Laura Dern (Lula Pace
Fortune), Diane Ladd (Marietta Fortune), Harry Dean Stanton (Johnnie Farragut),
J.E. Freeman (Marcello Santos), W. Morgan Sheppard (Mr Reindeer), Willem Dafoe
(Bobby Peru), Crispin Glover (Dell), Isabella Rossellini (Perdita Durango),
Sherilyn Fenn (Car Accident Girl), Sheryl Lee (Good Witch)
David Lynch is an eccentric film director. I think that is a
fair comment. At his best, he combines his “view askew” look at the world with
genuine comedy and pathos. At other times, his films disappear down a
self-reverential rabbit-hole that seems designed to frustrate and alienate the
viewer. Wild at Heart is the latter
type of movie.
Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) is released from prison after his
self-defence response to a knife-wielding man at a party turns into a homicidal
fury. The knifeman may (or may not) have been hired by Marietta (Diane Ladd), mother
to Sailor’s “girl” Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern, Ladd’s real life daughter) a
woman with a sexually troubled background of abuse, who is in the middle of a
sexual awakening. Together they go on a road trip to – well just kinda to get away
I guess.
I’ve got to confess I really hated this movie. I only stuck
with it to the end, because (a) it wasn’t that long and (b) I wanted to have
actually watched the whole thing before I laid into it in this review. This
film is the absolute worst elements of Lynchian oddness and gore mixed with
pop-culture references to the 1930s through to the 1950s.
In fact it’s a film that is so totally obsessed with these
two things that there is literally no room in it for any real plot or emotion.
Instead it’s full of pointless, smug and irritating visual and audio quotes
from Elvis to The Wizard of Oz, and empty characters played by showboating
actors giving massive performances under ostentatious make-up, all to hide the
fact that the film (for all its bombast) is a shallow as a puddle. It’s a
horrible piece of intellectual fakery, that pretends to be about deep profound
themes about love and death but tells us nothing about them. In the end it gets
more delight from Dafoe blowing his head off with a shotgun than it does from anything
to do with its so-called themes.
Lynch piles on the violence for the sake of it, all in the
name of parodying the aggression that lies under his apple-pie surface
Americana. This worked in Blue Velvet
because the contrast was so great, and the characters (for all their larger-than-life
qualities) felt real. Here, everything feels artificial. A constant visual
image of fire and flames runs through the story – it’s a reference back to the
murder (it’s not a surprise to say) of Lula’s father (burnt alive on the orders
of his wife it turns out). This adds nothing at all to our understanding of
anything – particularly since Marietta is the most obviously corrupt and
hypocritical character from the start, drawing attention in such a ham fisted
way to her past misdeeds, and the impact of them, hardly seems necessary.
The film is full of signs of man’s inhumanity – the brutal
shootings, the torture of Harry Dean Stanton’s luckless PI (toned down
considerably from the original cut), Sailor’s brutal murder at the start, a
road accident peopled with twisted bodies – but it’s all so bloody obvious. We
get it David, the world is bad and people suck. Just because you’ve shot this
with some tricky angles and carry it across with a tongue-in-cheek delight at
your own naughtiness doesn’t make this a masterpiece. It just highlights the
shallow emptiness you are peddling as art.
The rampant self-indulgence spreads to the actors. You’d
think Cage would be perfect for Lynch right? Wrong. His hideously
self-conscious performance of overt oddity here just makes his performance all
the more unbearable. Diane Ladd gives the sort of performance many call brave,
but is really just about shouting and smearing lipstick all over her face. By
the time Willem Dafoe turns up with ludicrous teeth, ripping into the scenery,
you’ve lost all patience. The only person who emerges with any credit is Laura
Dern, who at least invests her characters with some level of humanity and
sweetness. Everyone else (everyone!) is a stock cartoon drawing.
But even Dern is cursed with Lynch’s awful sexual abuse
sub-plot, which is genuinely offensive in its trite shallowness and in its
suggestion that having sex with your uncle as a young teenager will turn you
into a real goer later in life. Did he really deal with the same themes with
such sensitivity in Twin Peaks? As
for the so-called romantic happy ending – it’s unearned in any way by the film,
which has treated the subject with scorn. The film's dark wit isn't even particularly funny - everything is so dialed up to eleven, that all the comic beats get smothered in over acting or over stylised dialogue and action.
Wild at Heart won
a flipping Palme d’Or (to be fair the announcement was booed). But don’t be fooled.
This is a film pretending an intellectual depth it never gets anywhere near to
achieving. It’s a horrible, pathetic, cruel and empty film that thinks it’s a
satire on the dark heart that lies at America’s soul. It’s not. It’s just a
cartooney, self-important lecture which mistakes oddity and eccentricity for
heart. Lynch is a talent for sure, but here his talents are sorely misdirected
into indulgent, childish emptiness and faux profundity. Don’t watch it.
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