Wild At Heart

When Wild At Heart was released at the cinema in 1990, I went to see it 3 times in the first week. That was the height of a strangely cool David Lynch mania that had gripped the planet since he posed the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” in the groundbreaking, primetime TV series Twin Peaks.

Whilst this hidef release is very welcome, its budget price belies a bare-bones edition, obviously another example of the failing MGM Studios sell off its back catalog. Nevertheless, the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, MPEG-4 AVC transfer in full 1080p is a massive improvement on the Collector’s Edition DVD previously on offer, which suffered from an incredibly soft picture. Equally, enhanced is the DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack, which vastly improves the clarity of the dialogue and upscales both Randy Thom’s intricate sound design and Angelo Badalamenti’s original score.

Unfortunately, none of the extras contained in the DVD version have been reproduced here. In fact, this is the most basic Blu-ray menu I have ever seen, and reminiscent of Universal’s early DVD releases, this is just the movie and nothing more.  However, a great movie and one that deservedly won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and, despite being over 30 years old, it’s still a raw, racy, irreverent and impassioned celebration of the notion of true love conquering all.

Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are in the dizzy heights of blind love, but Lula’s mother, Marietta, played by Dern’s own mother Diane Ladd, does not approve of her daughter’s choice of lover, as she suspects he knows too much about her shady past, so she pays for him to be murdered. However, Sailor defends himself and kills his assailant for which he serves a two-year prison sentence. On his release, it is obvious that the star-crossed lovers still intend to be together, and they set out on a road trip bound for California, via New Orleans to escape Marietta’s wrath.

Hot on their heels is Private Detective Johnny Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) who follows them to a remote town called Big Tuna where the couple have stopped to rest as Lula is suffering from morning sickness.   Lynch very cleverly blurs the visceral authenticity of the lover’s plight with stylistic touchstones to heighten the reality of their idealism, such as using the character traits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as shorthand for Sailor and Lula and The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West to represent Marietta’s insane jealously. Lynch also employs rainbow tints during Sailor and Lula’s sex scenes and has Glinda the Good Witch (Sheryl Lee) visit Sailor when he’s about to give up, imploring him not to turn his back on love.  In lesser hands, this pick and mix of popular culture might have seemed trite or mawkish, but Lynch manages to weave all these contrasting elements into cinematic gold.

Wild At Heart contains an incredible vignette in which Sailor and Lula, whilst on the road, come across a car accident and a fatally wounded girl, played by Sherilyn Fenn. In this scene, Lynch turns the audience’s emotions upside down by playing it initially for comedy; the girl seems unaware of her severe head injury and is more concerned with finding her purse to fix her make-up, but then as it becomes apparent that we are about to see her die in front of us, he pulls the rug right from under our feet. Badalamenti’s score adds to the emotional turmoil here and this resonates as a key scene in Lynch’s canon, and he performs similar flips in his other work, possibly most notably in Betty’s audition scene in Mulholland Drive, which I shall review soon.

For the most part, Wild At Heart plays like a modern American Fairytale, and it wouldn’t be complete without a larger than life, malevolent villain and Willem Dafoe delivers one in spades with Bobby Peru, the ‘black angel of death’ who intends to come between Sailor and Lula; he is at once frightening and incredibly charismatic and provides a lot of the film’s sardonic humor making it unique in Lynch’s oeuvre as an uplifting, raucous road movie with an unmitigated happy ending, albeit ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek.