Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6123 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-11-28
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Special Edition
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Norwegian, Swedish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
David Lynch's 1990 Wild at Heart is an utterly random and ugly experience with pockets of startling imagery and inspired set pieces. Based on a Barry Gifford novel, the film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the lam whose relationship is tested and who meet some truly dangerous wackos (including an almost-simian Willem Dafoe). Lynch's thoughts seem to be everywhere, and he expects the audience to keep up with a story that seems more a collection of avant-garde whims than a coherent vision with the intuitive brilliance of his Blue Velvet. Cage gives one of his more chaotic performances, but then he was just reading Lynch's signposts. --Tom Keogh

Synopsis
In adapting Barry Gifford's colorful novel, David Lynch delivers another jolt of adrenaline to unsuspecting viewers everywhere. Wild At Heart follows the troubled romance of Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), two lovers who struggle to remain together even when fate seems intent on keeping them apart. In this case, fate is Lula's mother, Marietta Fortune (Diane Ladd), a desperate woman who hates Sailor and will do anything to keep him away from her daughter. After Sailor is released from prison for murdering a man albeit in self-defence he and Lula embark on a sex-filled, rocking road trip, aware that they are being hunted by one of Marietta's cronies. When they pull off the road in order to hide out in a small trailer park, Sailor befriends Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), an incredibly intense war veteran with a rotten set of teeth. Bobby convinces Sailor to help him rob a bank, much to Lula's objections (for she has discovered that she is pregnant). Sailor must decide if he wants to go straight and be there for his child or remain under Bobby's influence and risk returning to jail. Lynch's raucous film contains his trademark visual style, over-the-top dialogue, and pulsating soundtrack, creating another truly distinct picture.

Customer Reviews

Stylish weird magic
You will know within five minutes if this movie is your taste. Nicholas Cage gives a great performance as a bad Elvis type dude, with Laura Dern as his young, hot lover. Her mother is a sack of trouble and on the way there are plenty of odd, inspired performances. This is an odd road movie, and there's a lot to recommend it.

I thought this film was great but it requires you to meet it a little more than halfway. If this is you, you'll love it. Willem Dafoe (and his hideous teeth) deserve special mention. Great stuff.

A stark trip into the heart of the weird and not so wonderful.
It's true to say that Wild At Heart is perhaps one of David Lynch's more-flawed cinematic endeavours, with many of the scenes and indeed, the film as a whole, seeming incomplete or lacking any real purpose. One criticism of the film that tends to crop up most often is that the whole thing smacks of "weirdness for weirdness sake", with Lynch failing to tie his strange characters and their surreal situations to any kind of real narrative, which, I suppose, is true. However, despite these flaws, the film is still a great deal of fun, and although the whole thing is ultimately very silly, it still has enough bizarre high-points, set-pieces, sight-gags and cameos to make the whole thing ultimately worthwhile.

I suppose the film is best described as a vicious black-comedy, though the emphasis there is on 'vicious'. Lynch also makes allusions to the 'lovers on the run' genre of crime filmmaking popular in the 60's and 70's, taking it all further into the realms of the bizarre through his own cinematic obsessions (like deformities, arson, small-town Americana, detective fiction, good versus evil, car-accidents, etc), as well as more arcane references to Elvis, voodoo, incest, and the Wizard of Oz. It's a surreal trip, best summed up by the film's repeated mantra "wild at heart, weird on top" with Lynch seemingly revelling in this carnival of grotesques, whores, thugs and criminals, all gathered together in small-town New Mexico under a haze of blood and sex. American film critic Roger Ebert mockingly referred to the film as a "lurid melodrama, soap opera, exploitation put-on, and self-satire", which to me, sums up the film's most successful attributes. The plot takes off from films like Thieves Like Us, Bonnie & Clyde and Badlands, pre-dating Oliver Stone's similarly over-the-top dark-satire, Natural Born Killers, with two star-struck lovers hitting the road in an attempt to escape from the pressures of the modern-world (parole, poverty and an over-bearing mother). Lynch lays on the melodramatic clichés in broad stroke, to the point where all narrative references are to be taken with a pinch of salt... for example, it's not enough for our hero Sailor to be a murdering jail-bird from the wrong-side of the tracks, but he has to have a loving, sex-kitten girlfriend from a well-to-do neighbourhood with over-protective loved-ones. Admittedly, Lynch does subvert this almost saccharine depiction of moral family values by offering a flashback, in which our heroine, Lula, is assaulted by a predatory uncle, while her mother is later revealed to be a drunk, manic-depressive with mafia ties, which again, is all part of the joke.

There's also the spirit of the 50's, with Fredrick Elmes' colourful wide-screen cinematography bringing to mind the Technicolor melodrama of Hollywood's golden age, and the films of people like Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan and Douglas Sirk. There's also the obligatory references to the feckless youth of Brando in The Wild One, or the self-aware pastiche of Coppola's great film Rumble Fish, with the characters here looking and sounding like they've walked out of the pages of a lurid slice of pure pulp fiction. Of course, this is another problem that some viewers have had with the film, with Lynch offering no real characters - as he had done with masterpieces like The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet - and instead relying on arcane ciphers and bizarre caricatured grotesques. Again, this is all part of the fun and not really intended to be taken entirely seriously, with Lynch and his actors keeping the film moving from one out-burst of random surrealism to the next; with a number of humours and/or terrifying iconic performances from this esteemed, though certainly eclectic, cast of characters. The centre of the film, and indeed, the real focus of our attention, is established and sustained well through the relationship between the characters Sailor and Lula, which is developed surprisingly well through the strong and fearless performances of Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. Dern has never looked more stunning in a film as the sensual and unhinged Lula, whilst Cage reminds us of what a strong and intense character actor he used to be in the days before he switched to shallow Hollywood blockbusters. Both actors have a great chemistry with each other, and create a believable relationship in spite of the over-the-top abstractions and dramatic flourishes called for by Lynch's script. Amongst the supporting players, Harry Dean Stanton is a joy as the hound-dog private-investigator Johnny Farragut, who is sent looking for Sailor and Lula by his lover, Lula's mother Marietta Fortune, who is brought vividly to life with a grand-standing over-the-top relish by Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd.

Add some bizarre cameos from Lynch regulars, like Sherilyn Fenn, Jack Nance, Freddie Jones, Grace Zabriskie, Isabella Rossalini, Sheryl Lee (here continuing the Oz references with her climactic appearance as the good witch), J.E. Freeman, Crispin Glover (in one of the film's most bizarre scenes, as Lula's troubled cousin Dell), and an extended appearance by an unrecognisable Willem Dafoe, who's character Bobby Peru meets one of the most outlandish and overly violent sequences ever witnessed on screen. Certainly this film doesn't quite floor-me with it's madness as it used to when I was 14 or 15 (and would watch this and Blue Velvet pretty much religiously), with Lynch subsequently out-doing himself with the modern masterpiece Mulholland Drive. However, this film is probably more fun, and doesn't take as much concentration to really follow or get into it.

Ultimately, the film works depending on how much of Lynch's bizarre creations you can stand; with the film falling somewhere between the darkly-comic satire of Twin Peaks at it's most wittiest and the dark, industrial nightmare of Lost Highway, only with a more linear plot. I still think it's a great deal of fun, and will undoubtedly appeal to die-hard Lynch fans or those with an interest in cult American cinema.

dark stylish twisted road movie
early doors we are treated to a head being pummeled on marble steps to some crushing metal power chords and we know we're in good hands (the splendid mr lynch of course)

cage is on the run with the daugter of a nutty rich mum after torching the house and this gives the film its road movie basis, but lynch creates such compelling characters (cAGE'S ELVIS MAD SNAKESKIN JACKET WEARING ROmANTIC CRIMINAL; dearns nympho screamy femme fatale; defoe's foul creepy sleazy nutter crim) that its got so much more to it. add in the hyper surreal texas at night setting (including a pron film location shoot with 24 stone moms) and some priceless dialogue (cage confronted by a ganag of texmex thugs enquiring "now what do you foggots want?") and you have one of the best films of the 80's, make that ever.