In these moments Wild at Heart catches its breath before either Cage, or Lynch, or both, explode in their trademark off-the-wall ways. The film’s quieter scenes involve the lovers lounging around in crummy hotel rooms and cruising down freeways in a convertible. Sailor (Cage) and Lula (Dern) are Bonnie and Clyde types, on the run from the law and heading to California.
Or for that matter, Laura Dern, who is fiery and magnetic in the film’s second key performance. As a kid in primary and high school I never liked the term “best friend,” finding it unnecessarily exclusionary – which might explain my reluctance to bestow upon the man a numero uno status.Īcknowledging my love of Cage is basically a long-winded way of explaining why this article focuses primarily on him, not Lynch. It’s pedigree Cage, too, who is quite possibly my all-time favourite actor. Wild at Heart is pedigree Lynch, pairing his painterly Tarkovsky-on-acid aesthetic with the psychological dictatorship of, I don’t know, a Doctor Caligari type figure: some kind of mad genius. This hot-blooded, devil-may-care classic is now 30 years old, which is all the excuse I needed to revisit it.
Lines of dialogue (i.e “this ain’t no Emerald City” and ”I wish I was somewhere over the rainbow”) and visions of the good and wicked witches form a message about how differentiating between real and the imaginary is never as easy as clicking your heels – particularly in a Lynch movie.
There are numerous references to The Wizard of Oz. It’s potent like a bad dream seeping into daytime, as if painted in the gaps between consciousness and subconsciousness. Like most Lynch productions, this film – which was adapted from Barry Gifford’s novel and won the Cannes Film Festival’s prized Palme d’Or – is, indeed, a wild and intensely atmospheric ride. Or perhaps, given the film in question – 1990’s Wild at Heart – features fire as a visual motif and revolves around violent no-goodniks, it is a combo forged in that other place: the one down below. The combination of David Lynch as director and Nicolas Cage as lead actor is a match made in heaven.