Sailor brutally beats his assailant to death and winds up doing 22 months for manslaughter. Marietta even goes so far as to hire a goon to kill Sailor during a party. That said, even though I wouldn’t go out of my way to rescue it from a flaming warehouse-an apt metaphor considering its fire-heavy visual motifs-it still contains enough strong and interesting stuff to make it worth watching.Īdapted from the novel by Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, the Elvis-obsessed bad boy Sailor Ripley ( Nicolas Cage) and the hot-to-trot Lula ( Laura Dern), much to the consternation of her mother, Marietta ( Diane Ladd). It’s the one time in his career where it feels as if he’s consciously trying to meet expectations of what a “David Lynch movie” should entail, instead of following his personal vision.

To be fair, Wild at Heart is not “bad,” per se-no Lynch film could ever really be-as much as it is non-essential. Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in “Wild at Heart”. This capped off a period in which he had unexpectedly gone from being the avant-garde weirdo behind Eraserhead to the most talked-about artistic voice in America not named Madonna in the wake of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. His wild and woolly road movie made its tumultuous debut at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. However, if I were inexplicably forced to kick one of Lynch’s films to the curb, I would not hesitate for a second to select Wild at Heart.

Hell, even his usually maligned and generally misbegotten adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1984) has proven itself to be a stunning visual marvel that is a lot better than its reputation might suggest. Most of the rest of his output-including The Elephant Man (1980), Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999) and Inland Empire (2006)-is not that far behind. But of those, I would not hesitate to call three of them- Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001)-stone-cold masterpieces. He has only made 10 feature films to date (the groundbreaking Twin Peaks saga is a television series, so let us nip that discussion in the bud). Like many others, I consider David Lynch to be one of the most unique and distinctive voices to emerge in the entire history of cinema.

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