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159 reviews in total

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64 out of 76 people found the following review useful:
Mesmerizing., 1 March 2005
Author: Vancity_Film_Fanatic from Vancouver, BC, Canada

Recipient of the prestigious Palme d'Or award at Cannes, David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" is an amazingly brilliant spectacle for the senses. Bold splashes of deep red, curiously staged musical numbers (Nicolas Cage does his own singing – and he's great!), and the continuous references to "The Wizard of Oz" help create a surreal and dreamlike texture to the narrative. The story in brief: Sailor and Lula (excellent performances from both Nicolas Cage & Laura Dern); two broken souls passionately in love, flee the vengeful wrath of Lula's mother Marietta, who for reasons of her own will stop at nothing to ensure the lovers are kept apart. Diane Ladd practically steals the show in her brave portrayal of Lula's psychopathic mother Marietta. Gut wrenchingly violent in places, hopelessly romantic in others; Lynch has crafted an adult fairy tale worthy of multiple viewings. Recommended to those who enjoy and appreciate abstract methods of film-making – a definite 10/10!

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58 out of 70 people found the following review useful:
Lynch on the road to hell, 12 February 2004

Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls

The most creative and controversial director in cinema is back with a road-movie! Wild at Heart is one rough roller coaster ride and a typical Lynch-cocktail of violence, sex and of course…bizarre characters. I challenge you to find one personality in this film that could be referred to as a ‘normal human being'. As usually, Lynch introduces a bunch of wicked individuals in his film who're all messed up in the head pretty bad. Yet, I feel like Wild at Heart might be Lynch's most accessible film (outside The Elephant Man and The Straight Story). The structure remains chronological and quite easy to follow. Unlike the previous Blue Velvet, I feel like the plot and development of Wild at Heart is a bit inferior to the wonderful photography. The greatest aspects in the screenplay are in fact the delicious side-chapters that are told without absolute necessity. Like the story about Lula's cousin Dell (Crispin Glover), the torture of Harry Dean Stanton's character and the nasty and disturbing images of a car accident the protagonists come across. These are the little sequences that truly prove Lynch's talent as a storyteller. Overall and simply put: this movie is COOL! It's a joy to watch and you really hate to love some of the offensive characters. Willem Dafoe takes the cake as Bobby Peru. His portrayal is a neat follow-up to Blue Velvet's Frank Booth. Peru is a filthy and despicable pervert with itchy-trigger-fingers! It's a damn shame he hasn't got any more screen time. Wild at Heart surely isn't the greatest masterpiece out there, but you should love it for what it is: an absurd and entertaining adventure with a couple of thought-provoking values and an extraordinary love-lesson.

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49 out of 63 people found the following review useful:
In A Word: Outrageous!, 7 January 2006

Author: ccthemovieman-1 from Lockport, NY, United States

Outrageous! This is another sick-but-fascinating David Lynch film, maybe his sickest, although I've never seen Eraserhead.

The most interesting feature of this strange movie, I think, was the weird characters, one after the other. Make that ultra-weird.....and the strangest of them all is "Bobby Peru," played by Willem Dafoe. In all my years of movie watching, I think "Bobby Peru" still has to rank in the top five of the creepiest characters. He is so outrageously disgusting and perverted you just have to laugh out loud at him.

In fact, "outrageous" might be the best word to describe this film, characters and all.

This wild and entertaining film sometimes makes me shake my head in disgust that I own it, and at other times makes me just laugh out loud at the absurdity of it. You really have to have a dark sense of humor to appreciate much of it. I do, to some degree....enough to keep viewing this.

Nicholas Cage is particularly fun to watch and provides most of the laughs. Laura Dern is also convincing as a trailer-trash-type. If you want a clue on why Dern would play such a sleazy role, check out her real-life mom in this film, Diane Ladd, who plays her mother in the movie. It looks like Mom passed on her wholesome values.

As with some other Lynch films, the music is outstanding: just a great soundtrack. I bought the CD to this a year after first seeing the movie, and I've always enjoyed it. And, another Lynch trait that certainly is here is the excellent visual style, which is enhanced by the widescreen DVD.

So, if you are looking for an outrageous two hours and you aren't easily shocked or offended, this would be a film to consider.

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37 out of 45 people found the following review useful:
This whole world is Wild at Heart and crazy on top, 29 September 1999

Author: Afracious from England

Wild at Heart begins with an arresting scene of bloody violence by one of the two lead characters, Sailor Ripley, and this immediately grabs our attention. After this he hooks up with his lover, Lula, who he fiercely protects, and goes on a bizarre road trip into the deep south of the states, while avoiding Lula's mother, played with passion by a deservedly Oscar-nominated Diane Ladd, who has an obsessive hatred for Sailor. They meet an assortment of weird people, especially Bobby Peru, and also Perdita Durango, who has appeared recently in a film with her name as the title, also written by Barry Gifford. It is classic David Lynch, with a homage type theme to the Wizard of Oz. It has the sensuality and eroticism later seen in Lost Highway, the violence and gore, the head sequence after the bank robbery being graphic, and a general uneasiness throughout. But it is a darkly humorous and transfixing piece.

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34 out of 57 people found the following review useful:
Languorous violence, 30 June 2004
Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico

When Lynch wants to say something he takes his time, no doubt about it. Sometimes he takes his time even when he doesn't have much to say. Example?

Isabella Rosselini in torn stocking, shabby wig, and red shoes is swaying gently to some music when Willem DaFoe crashes in and gives her a vigorous smooch. That's the beginning and the end of the scene. Another example? Cage and Laura Dern are having an argument just after he's let out of the slams. She's nervous and upset because she hasn't seen him in six years. He looks at her intently and tells her it's a mistake for them to get back together again. There is about a twenty-second closeup of Dern's magnificent blue eyes. They don't drip with tears. They don't even blink. They stare directly into the camera. Why? Like you, I'd have to guess. (I'd guess that her unblinking, unteary stare is meant to tell us that she sees things pretty clearly despite being shaken. That's pretty banal, I know, but my mind is open to other interpretations.)

I don't mean to sound as if I'm bashing the movie because that's not what I mean to do. Let's linger a little over a much later scene. It takes place in the middle of a city street, El Paso I would guess, but it's one of those industrial-area streets that are deserted on weekends. It's a wide sun-baked silent street cluttered with drunken-looking telephone poles and lined with one-story factories and warehouses, and there is a city skyline way in the distant, cerulean with urban haze. And Cage is walking alone through this bleak and ominous landscape. But it's not only the visuals that makes this scene outstanding. A handful of viperous dudes wearing black fall in behind Cage's figure and another group of Thugees finally blocks his way in mid-street. The music comes to an abrupt halt. Nobody says anything. The atmosphere throbs with threat. Cage sets down his suitcase, takes the time to deliberately light a cigarette, looks around him, and asks, "Okay -- what do you faggots want?" What they want is to beat the hell out of him, and they get their wish. The unconscious Cage has a vision of The Nice Witch of the West (don't ask) and when he recovers he finds he's still surrounded by these sadistic brutes who ask him if he's had enough. He struggles to his feet, gingerly feeling his "broken" rubber nose, and says, "Yes, I've had enough. Furthermore, I'd like to apologize for referring to you dudes earlier as homosexuals. You've taught me a lesson." Then he runs away ecstatically. How many other movies can boast ten minutes worth of film like that?

Now, I can see where a lot of ten-year-olds (or ten-year-old minds) might be bored with this film. It's long. There isn't an abundance of violence, although DaFoe does get his head blown off by twin blasts from a shotgun. I mean, quite literally, his head is blown completely off. It bounces off the wall like a football and lands with a loud splat on the pavement. So maybe there's a little hope for the horror afficionados after all, but not much, when you get right down to it.

The movie is punctuated with violence and, even more, with oddities, but mostly it moves languorously. Cage and Dern thrum through the Texas night in a shiny old convertible whose radio plays nothing but news like, "A man won his appeal today for dismissal of charges that he ate his own child." Well -- not that, but equally weird. One relative of Dern gets his kicks by putting a cockroach directly on his nether orifice. Willem DaFoe should definitely sue his dental surgeon. He thrusts his mouth close to Dern's at one point, urging her to say something filthy to him and he'll let her go, and his mouth is like a limpet's, his lips a disgusting circle of membrane filled with hideous teeth.

I wouldn't argue that "Wild at Heart" should be put into a time capsule, but it's not a movie that's easy to forget. David Lynch may or may not be a hot commercial property but he's one of the most original directors working today.

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13 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Beautiful, violent, funny and surreal--a masterpiece from David Lynch, 22 July 2005

Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City

This is one of my favorite David Lynch films. It is also one of the more transparent, easy to understand Lynch films, although that's not the reason why it's one of my favorites. But that fact also makes Wild at Heart a good candidate for introducing someone to Lynch.

On the other hand, although it's more transparent and linear on a surface level, I'm still not sure I've figured out the multilayered, bizarre subtexts and symbolism that lie deep beneath the surface--even though I've seen it a few times now. Assuming that there is indeed something to figure out. To an extent, it seems like maybe the hint of something "deeper" is in this case more of a red herring. This is one of Lynch's funnier films, albeit very macabre humor. It contains references to all of Lynch's most common "content quirks"—including sequined ingénues singing jazz, manipulative housewife types, shots of asphalt speeding by, minor characters with freaky speech "impediments", severed body parts, and on and on--but it's almost as if he's making fun of himself. Combine that with excellent performances (including a hilarious bit part for Crispin Glover, one of my favorite actors/personalities), a sublimely incongruous score, and a retro, gripping, violent road trip saga cum romance that presages both Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) and just about all of Quentin Tarantino's career, and you've got quite a film.

Wild at Heart, based on a novel by Barry Gifford, is the tale of Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), a doe-eyed, "classy white trash" couple. As the film starts--and what a start it is--someone tries to stab Sailor to death as he's exiting a theater. Sailor will have none of it, and Lynch begins the film on an exhilarating, brutally violent note--this is not a film for the faint of heart. To complicate matters and set up the primary conflict, we learn even before the attempted stabbing that the hit man was sent by Lula's mother, Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd), who claimed that Sailor tried to seduce her in the bathroom (this isn't quite true, as we learn in detail later).

There isn't a character in the film who isn't involved with some shady business, either presently or in the past. Sailor and Marietta's tensions stem from many years ago, when Lula was just a girl (she's supposedly quite a bit younger than Sailor). The events of the film's opening result in Sailor being imprisoned. Lula dutifully waits for his release, much to the consternation of her mom. The basic gist of the film is disarmingly simple--Sailor and Lula are headed across the country, with an eventual goal of California, as Marietta tries to arrange for Sailor to be put away for good. There are many finely realized subplots and detailed tangents, but that's the crux of the plot on the surface.

In addition to his typical hyperreal/surreal weirdness, Lynch concocts a very improbable stew of influences that work together beautifully. Lula has something of an obsession with The Wizard of Oz (1939). She's haunted by visions of the wicked witch (including the "evil cackle"), and she sees the road trip as a veritable journey to the Emerald City. Lynch works in a lot of subtle references to The Wizard of Oz with other characters, too. Sailor is something like lounge version of Elvis reincarnated as a gangster flunky, with even better karate moves to match. Yet the two are huge heavy metal fans, especially of a band named "Powermad", whose music exquisitely punctuates many sequences, including some sublime dance scenes. In the first half, important scenes are set in New Orleans, with the familiar unsettling undertone that that locale often has in films--you can just smell the voodoo, sex, drugs and death bubbling beneath the skin of the city. Later scenes are set in the desolate, desert prairie country of Texas, which turns out to be even more unsettling (even though I really find such places refreshing and relaxing). There are other kinds of symbolic, stylistic and literal references worked into the film, such as the constant fire motif, which Lynch shoots beautifully, but the above is to just give you an idea of the stew.

It all seems like it should add up to some subtextual grand narrative, and maybe it does, but I haven't quite figured out what it all means yet. But it doesn't matter. The stylistic flourishes are ingenious superficially, too, and maybe Lynch _is_ just poking fun at being Lynch. Here, perhaps more than in any other work, he has found the perfect balance between the soap-operatic and the utterly bizarre--the filmic equivalent to author Harry Crews' best work.

Tarantino doesn't tend to have pithy subtexts in his films, either, but they're no worse the wear for that, and when Wild at Heart takes a turn into typical Tarantino territory, Lynch is just as captivating, gritty and groovy, plus he's doing it before Tarantino himself. At the same time, Lynch manages to maintain a parallel lush, erotic romance between Sailor and Lula--Dern is incredibly sexy/sensuous here. This material works as well, and supplies what just may be the message of the film after all--that love can (eventually) conquer all, even the stuff that's "wild at heart and weird on top".

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37 out of 69 people found the following review useful:
SHOCK!, 4 December 1999

Author: Hprog from Venezuela

This movie is along my TOP-10 favorites. It's a shocking experience and a proof of what David Lynch's movies mean to those of us who enjoy shocking movies. It's a love story told in a different way. Great acting, great music (from Classic to Speed Metal), erotism, suspense, this film has everything you could ever want in a good movie. Two thumbs up!

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A Surreal, Nightmarish Road trip that's Wild at Heart and Weird on Top!, 5 August 2005

Author: NateManD from Bloomsburg PA

"Wild at Heart" is one deranged and twisted road trip as only David Lynch could bring you. It's so dark but at times funny too. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicholas Cage)are in love, but Lula's mother played by Laura Dern's real life mother Diane Ladd is evil. She doesn't want to see them together. Because of a murder, Sailor is finally released from prison. Lula's mom hires people to kill sailor. So Lula and Sailor go on a crazy road trip with dark and fellini like characters. William Defoe is unforgettable as the creepy and perverted Bobby Peru. The film almost received an X/NC-17 rating. It's easy to see why, it has lots of disturbing sex and violence. But than again that's a David Lynch trademark. This film is probably on my list of favorite road trip movies, next to Godard's "Weekend" (1967), "Thelma & Louise" and "Natural Born Killers". Both Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern give amazing performances. Dern's character Lula is the complete opposite of Sandy in "Blue Velvet", cause she's so wild and sexual. But Lula still has a naive child like charm. It seems that actor Nicholas Cage was born to play Sailor, a charming Elvis like ex convict who wants to change his ways. Also check out Berry Gifford's sequel to Wild at Heart, "Perdita Durango" (aka. dance with the devil) These films are both Wild at Heart and weird on Top!

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Lynch puts the odd in 'odyssey', 12 November 2009

Author: Ali_Catterall from London, England

By 1990, David Lynch was the foremost surrealist of US cinema, a position cemented by Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and his long-running cult TV series 'Twin Peaks', a bizarre deconstructed soap. As a director-for-hire, he'd also displayed versatility for tackling more mainstream fare as evinced by The Elephant Man and Dune, with plaudits for the former and critical brickbats for the latter.

Lynchian cinema was more popular in Europe than on his home turf, and came to be synonymous with the perception of the director himself, a former all-American boy (and latterly, Ronald Reagan admirer) distorted by a funhouse mirror to resemble, as Elephant Man producer Mel Brooks wryly observed, "Jimmy Stewart from Mars". The repressed, ultra-conservative "I Like Ike" generation had some very peculiar stuff in its closet. Lynch made it his currency.

After 'Twin Peaks', expectations were at fever pitch for Lynch's next project. The director came across Barry Gifford's novella 'Wild At Heart' while still in its proofing stages and fashioned a loose adaptation in six days. Unusually for Lynch, the script's pretty straightforward and chronological; as Wild At Heart star Dafoe noted later, "I was always shocked at how logical it was - its world was so complete." But as ever, El Diablo's in the details.

Here, Blue Velvet's yuppie nightmare becomes a white trash ticket to Hell: reckless Sailor Ripley (Cage, in full-on Elvis mode) loves hopeless romantic Lula Fortune (Dern), which drives Marietta Fortune (played by Dern's real-life mother Ladd) round the twist. After her lascivious advances to Sailor are spurned, she sends a hit-man after him, who Sailor kills - graphically, smashing his skull to splinters. On release from prison and defying his probation for "manslaughter", Sailor and lusty Lula hit the pedal for California, encountering all manner of Lynchian freaks en route. Unbeknown to them, Lula's insanely jealous mother has hired seedy PI Johnnie Farragut (Stanton) and various thugs to hunt them down, culminating in a stand-off in one-horse-town 'Big Tuna' with evil gunman Bobby Peru (Dafoe).

A dream turning inexorably to nightmare, Wild At Heart's an all-out assault on the senses, aided immeasurably by Angelo Badalamenti's fantastically smoky score. But the director's trademark oddities (from obese prom queens and cockroach-bothering relatives to Ladd's hellish, red lipstick-covered face) seem forced, and unlike Eraserhead there's scant emotional heart.

With deliberately over-the-top performances (from Ladd and Defoe, particularly), characterisation always takes a back seat to knowing iconography, along with campy references to The Wizard Of Oz - Dern imagines Ladd as the Wicked Witch of the West, while 'Twin Peaks' star Sheryl Lee portrays Glinda.

Nevertheless, amid catcalls and cheers - and much to Lynch's bemusement - the film won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival; a fitting opener to a decade which would see the director's post-modern riff on American pop-culture become de rigeur in independent US cinema, ultimately achieving more cross-over successes than Lynch ever imagined.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top.", 24 June 2009
Author: Rents (Renty_Misses_Christmas) from London, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A feast for the eyes, David Lynch's Wild at Heart is a sensuous spectacle. The picture is littered with some beautiful photography, splashes of yellow and red accentuating a world that is as chilling as it is fascinating, and as mesmerizing as it is haunting. Following the love affair between Lula and Sailor, who is thrown in jail for killing a man, he is released several years later and then the two begin a cross country journey to freedom so they can live their lives and love each other without consequence, all while experiencing some new things that both bring fun to their adventures as well as chill to the bone, and as Lula's mother Marietta hires a hit-man to follow their trail and end the affair she has disapproved of from the beginning.

The journey itself that the two take is mesmerizing. From getting caught up in a bank robbery to coming across a girl in a nasty car accident (symbolizing their own hesitant and jeopardized futures, to dancing till the wee hours of the morning and making love wherever and whenever, the two have to be one of the most intriguing couples ever put on film. Lula is feisty and unsure of herself. Sailor is tough as nails and defensive of his woman. The thing that binds the two of them together through thick and through thin is their undying love for each other, and that remains truer the more they go through. Even the ending further exemplifies their affair and proves that even through the hardest times, there is no end and no death to their tumultuous romance.

Even through the lessons learned, it would be an unfair assumption if one thought that this sounded like the ordinary, sappy love story complete with the typical ups and downs of romantic comedies. It is none of these things. The performances are believable and tortured, the tears emotional and heartfelt, and the love rough and passionate. It has to be seen to be believed, for I doubt any words in any reviews before this one and henceforth could ever do it complete justice.

The film is dark in its own special way. David Lynch once again stuns his audience with a surreal and beautiful work of art that is both enticing and nightmarish. The universe is turned upside down as it usually is in his films (viewers need only to check out Blue Velvet to understand my point) and we love it all, going along for the ride with all the glee of a gang of fourth graders getting away from class to go on a field trip. A masterful director, Lynch employs the use of color and music (you've just got to love Nicolas Cage's singing voice; I'm no fan of his, but he is absolutely wonderful here!) and imagery to die for.

Cage is fantastic as the rough and tough Sailor. Laura Dern is excellent as Lula and displays the excellent emotional range that would earn her an Oscar nomination the following year for her brilliant performance in Rambling Rose. Dern's mother Diane Ladd is fantastic as her nasty mother Marietta. Her performance is absolutely amazing. I haven't seen anything quite like it. She gives it her all and the hard work pays off brilliantly. The supporting cast is wonderful and memorable (you can always count on Lynch for excellent casting); Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie, Isabella Rossellini and Sherilynn Fenn round out an excellent ensemble, all giving wonderful performances.

Wild at Heart appeals to the crazed romantic in all of us—just prepare yourself for a very strange love story with no regard for the ordinary.

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