Thoughts on Wild at Heart

     On Criterion, I watched Wild at Heart, a 1990 Southern Gothic crime film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. The film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, two young lovers who, after Sailor is released from prison for having murdered a man in self-defense, go on the run from Lula's domineering mother Marietta (Diane Ladd), who has hired hitmen to kill Sailor. 

    Nicolas Cage brings out his Elvis Presley impersonations as Sailor, as a romantic outlaw who sings Presley ballads to his girlfriend but says he will only sing "Love Me Tender" to his future wife, and does high kicks and punching the air while dancing. Laura Dern brought out a more sexual side as Lula, a young woman of twenty who is a survivor of sexual assault as a child and has a passionate excitement for Sailor, even after he bludgeoned a man to death (initially in self-defense because Marietta sent him to kill him, but then going beyond into a murderous rage) and acts jealous and threatening towards a guy at a rock show for dancing with Lula.

    Diane Ladd plays up soap opera theatrics as Marietta, painting red lipstick all over her face and being in hysterics over the phone, seeing Sailor as dangerous for her daughter, but she is also involved with hitmen and gangsters, and was complicit with the death of her husband. 

    Sailor and Lula travel together from North Carolina to California, breaking his parole, driving in a convertible and stop in Texas along the way, where Sailor meets up with an old acquaintance, Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini), and he doesn't know that she knows that there is a contract out on him, and that she is linked up with Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a slimy criminal with rancid teeth.

    The movie is a weird and wild mess, but really captivating to watch. Cage and Dern bring a lot of raw sexuality and passion to their love scenes, and their characters' relationship has a romantic "us against the world" feel to it, that amazingly doesn't end in flames. 

    The film is stacked with character actors: Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover (in a tragic flashback story as Lula's cousin who is struggling with psychosis issues and breaks with reality), J.E. Freeman, Jack Nance, W. Morgan Sheppard, Grace Zabriskie, David Patrick Kelly, Frances Bay, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and others. There's an early role by Sheryl Lee the same year she played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks as a hallucination of Glinda the Good Witch, and Sherilyn Fenn, also from Twin Peaks, played a traumatized survivor of a car accident with brain damage who succumbs to her injuries.

    The film has a lot of references to The Wizard of Oz, with Lula clicking her red heels to want to escape a traumatic situation; the Glinda hallucination; Lula picturing her mother as the Wicked Witch of the West; referring to the road they traveled on as the yellow brick road, and other mentions. It goes along with the fantasy of the film, of being this weird road trip/romance/Southern Gothic movie, playing Elvis Presley songs and briefly the intro of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" in one scene.

    Isabella Rossellini had a lot of glamour with her blonde wig and dark unibrow as Perdita, but the role would be better known when played by Rosie Perez in 1997's Dance with the Devil (also known as Perdita Durango). The character was from the novel and from Barry Gifford's 1992 novel 59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango. In Rossellini's 1997 memoir Some of Me, she said that she based the look of Perdita on Frida Kahlo:

    "For my character, Perdita Durango, I used Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are a series of obsessive self-portraits. Frida Kahlo portrayed herself as attractive and repulsive at the same time. She is beautiful and feminine, but she is hairy, a bit like an ape, with a mustache and two eyebrows that are really one big one across her forehead. This combination of attractiveness/repulsiveness fascinated me . . . I used a bad blond wig that exposed black roots and a tight dress, sexy but vulgar. I changed my body posture and I added hair so I, too, could have one eyebrow across my forehead. My Perdita, I believe, conveyed the impression of a person who is repulsive and attractive at the same time . . . Perdita is my best example of modeling skills applied to acting."

    But Willem Dafoe was the scene-stealer as Bobby Peru, a truly disgusting person who sexually threatens and assaults Lula, triggering her childhood rape, and whom Sailor joins in a robbery, against his better judgment. Dafoe is fantastic in this film and utterly memorable.

    I really liked this film. I hadn't seen it since I was a teenager, and barely remembered it aside from the main romance and Lula's line to Sailor, "You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt." I liked revisiting it and understanding it better and taking it all in, and enjoying the weird ride of it all.