Wild at Heart (film)

Wild at Heart is a 1990 American romantic crime comedy-drama thriller film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton, the film follows Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, a young couple who go on the run from Lula's domineering mother and the criminals she hires to kill Sailor.
Lynch intended only to produce the film, but after reading Gifford's book, he decided to write and direct it as well. He disliked the ending of the novel and decided to change it to fit his vision of the main characters. The film is noted for its allusions to The Wizard of Oz and Elvis Presley. Early test screenings for the film were poorly received, with Lynch estimating that at least 300 people walked out due to its sexual and violent content.
Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, which at the time was considered a controversial decision. The film was theatrically released in the United States on August 17, 1990, to polarized reviews from critics and grossed $14 million against its $10 million budget. At the 6th Independent Spirit Awards, Dafoe was nominated for Best Supporting Male and Elmes won for Best Cinematography. Ladd was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture at the 63rd Academy Awards and the 48th Golden Globe Awards, respectively. The film has been positively reevaluated by critics in the years since its release.
In Cape Fear, North Carolina, lovers Lula Fortune and Sailor Ripley are separated after he is jailed for killing a man who attacked him with a knife; the assailant, Bobby Ray Lemon, was hired by Lula's mother, Marietta. Upon Sailor's release 22 months later, Lula picks him up outside prison, where she hands him his snakeskin jacket. They have sex in a hotel room and go to see speed metal band Powermad. At the club, Sailor beats up a man for flirting with Lula, and then leads the band in a rendition of the Elvis Presley song "Love Me". When Lula asks why Sailor didn't sing her his favorite song, "Love Me Tender", he tells her he will only ever sing it to his future wife.
Sailor asks Lula to run away to California with him, despite knowing this will break his parole. Marietta asks her on-off boyfriend, private detective Johnnie Farragut, to find them and bring them back. Unbeknownst to Farragut, Marietta also hires her other boyfriend, gangster Marcello Santos, to track them and kill Sailor. When Santos calls mob boss Mr. Reindeer to arrange for the job, he adds Farragut to the hit list, sending Marietta into a guilt-fueled psychosis. Despite her attempts to save Farragut, Mr. Reindeer's assassins capture and kill him.
Unaware of these events, Lula and Sailor continue on their way until they encounter the aftermath of a two-car collision. They try to help the only survivor, a traumatized and brain-damaged young woman who eventually dies in front of them. Lula is disturbed, and considers it a bad omen. She is also unsettled by Sailor's revelation that he had been Santos' driver and may have witnessed her father's murder by Santos and Marietta, which places him in the latter's crosshairs.
Nearly penniless, Sailor heads for Big Tuna, Texas, where he asks old acquaintance Perdita Durango whether someone is after him. Perdita says she is unaware of any murder contract, but is later revealed to be lying. At an outdoor party, Lula and Sailor meet career criminal Bobby Peru. Lula, who has been feeling ill, tells Sailor she is pregnant. While Sailor is changing their car's oil, Lula waits for him in the motel room. Peru enters the room, deduces Lula's pregnancy and proceeds to intimidate, grope and violently coerce her into asking him for sex; when she finally does, he mockingly reveals his threats to be a bluff and leaves. This traumatizes Lula, who was previously raped as a child.
Not knowing about Peru's abuse of Lula, Sailor agrees to accompany him to a bar. Over beers, Peru enlists Sailor's help in robbing a nearby feed store. During the robbery, Peru unnecessarily shoots the two store clerks and admits to Sailor that he has been hired to kill him, and that he handed Sailor a pistol with dummy ammunition. Chasing Sailor out of the store, Peru is repeatedly shot by a sheriff's deputy and accidentally blows his own head off with his shotgun. Sailor is sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the robbery.
While Sailor is in jail, Lula has their child. Lula decides to reunite with him upon his release, rejecting her mother's objections over the phone. She throws water over Marietta's photograph and goes to pick up Sailor with their son, Pace. The reunion is awkward and Sailor decides to leave them both, believing they will be better off without his influence. While he is walking a short distance away, Sailor is accosted by members of a street gang, and is quickly knocked out after insulting them. While unconscious, he sees a vision of Glinda the Good Witch, who tells him, "Don't turn away from love, Sailor." When he awakens, Sailor apologizes to the men, tells them he realizes the error of his ways, and runs after Lula. The photograph of Marietta in Lula's house sizzles and vanishes, symbolically mirroring the demise of Wicked Witch of the West. Sailor runs over the roofs and hoods of the cars in a traffic jam to reunite with Lula and Pace. When he catches up with them, he finally sings "Love Me Tender" to Lula, effectively proposing to her.
In the summer of 1989, Lynch had finished the pilot episode for the successful television series Twin Peaks, and tried to rescue two of his projects—Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble—both involved in contractual complications as a result of the bankruptcy of Dino De Laurentiis, which had been bought by Carolco Pictures. Lynch stated, "I've had a bad time with obstacles...it wasn't Dino's fault, but when his company went down the tubes, I got swallowed up in that." Independent production company Propaganda Films commissioned Lynch to develop an updated noir screenplay based on a 1940s crime novel, while Monty Montgomery, a friend of Lynch's and an associate producer on Twin Peaks, asked novelist Barry Gifford what he was working on. Gifford happened to be writing the manuscript for Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula but still had two more chapters to write. He let Montgomery read it in pre-published galley form while the producer was working on the pilot episode for Twin Peaks. Montgomery read it, and two days later he called Gifford and told him that he wanted to make a film of it. Two days after that, Montgomery gave Gifford's book to Lynch while he was editing the pilot, asking him if he would executive produce a film adaptation that he would direct. Lynch remembers telling him, "That's great, Monty, but what if I read it and fall in love with it and want to do it myself?" Montgomery did not think that Lynch would like the book because he did not think it was his "kind of thing". Lynch loved the book and called Gifford soon afterwards, asking him if he could make a film of it. Lynch remembers, "It was just exactly the right thing at the right time. The book and the violence in America merged in my mind and many different things happened." Lynch was drawn to what he saw as "a really modern romance in a violent world—a picture about finding love in Hell", and was also attracted to "a certain amount of fear in the picture, as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some way".
Lynch got approval from Propaganda to switch projects; however, production was scheduled to begin only two months after the rights had been purchased, forcing him to work fast. Lynch had Cage and Dern read Gifford's book and wrote a draft in a week. By Lynch's own admission, his first draft was "depressing and pretty much devoid of happiness, and no one wanted to make it". Lynch did not like the ending in Gifford's book, where Sailor and Lula split up for good. For Lynch, "it honestly didn't seem real, considering the way they felt about each other. It didn't seem one bit real! It had a certain coolness, but I couldn't see it." It was at this point that the director's love of The Wizard of Oz (1939) began to influence the script he was writing, and he included a reference to the "yellow brick road". Lynch remembers, "It was an awful tough world, and there was something about Sailor being a rebel. But a rebel with a dream of the Wizard of Oz is kinda like a beautiful thing." Samuel Goldwyn Jr. read an early draft of the screenplay and did not like Gifford's ending either, so Lynch changed it. However, the director was worried that this change made the film too commercial, "much more commercial to make a happy ending yet, if I had not changed it, so that people wouldn't say I was trying to be commercial, I would have been untrue to what the material was saying".
Lynch added new characters, such as Mr. Reindeer and Sherilyn Fenn as the victim of a car accident. During rehearsals, Lynch began talking about Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe with Cage and Dern. He also acquired a copy of Elvis' Golden Records and after listening to it, called Cage and told him that he had to sing two songs, "Love Me" and "Love Me Tender". Cage agreed, and recorded them so that he could lip-synch to them on the set. Cage asked Lynch if he could wear a snakeskin jacket in the film, and Lynch incorporated it into his script. Before filming started, Dern suggested that she and Cage go on a weekend road trip to Las Vegas in order to bond and get a handle on their characters. Dern remembers, "We agreed that Sailor and Lula needed to be one person, one character, and we would each share it. I got the sexual, wild, Marilyn, gum-chewing fantasy, female side; Nick's got the snakeskin, Elvis, raw, combustible, masculine side." Within four months, Lynch began filming on August 9, 1989, in both Los Angeles (including the San Fernando Valley) and New Orleans with a relatively modest budget of $10 million. Originally, Wild at Heart featured more explicit erotic scenes between Sailor and Lula. In one, she has an orgasm while relating to Sailor a dream she had of being ripped open by a wild animal. Another deleted scene had Lula lowering herself onto Sailor's face saying, "Take a bite of Lula."
Wild at Heart features the Chris Isaak song "Wicked Game", for which a music video was made—directed by Lynch, and featuring scenes of Sailor and Lula interspersed with black-and-white footage of Isaak performing the song.
The introduction to Im Abendrot from Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs is featured in several scenes of the film.
According to Lynch, one of the film's themes is "finding love in Hell". He has stated: "For me, it's just a compilation of ideas that come along. The darker ones and the lighter ones, the humorous ones, all working together. You try to be as true as you can to those ideas and try to get them on film." The film has been compared to Lynch's previous Blue Velvet, with both said to explore the dark side of the United States.
There are various references to The Wizard of Oz, which has been interpreted as indicative of the overall fantasy world of the movie, which Sailor's obsession with the fantasies of Elvis and the couple's fantastical relationship also speak to. The movie also depicted a previously unseen level of violence. Lynch himself commented on interviews that the book on which the film was based was "exactly the right thing at the right time" and that "each year we give permission for people to get away with more".
Some critics have postulated that, similar to Blue Velvet, the sudden idealistic ending of perfect happiness is ironic, suggesting that people who have the potential for violence struggle to find true happiness. However, Lynch himself refers to the ending of Wild at Heart as being "happy", having consciously made the decision to change the original darker ending from the novel.
Early test screenings for Wild at Heart did not go well, with the strong violence in some scenes being too much. At the first test screening, 80 people walked out during a graphic torture scene involving Johnnie Farragut. Lynch decided not to cut anything from the film, and at the second screening, 100 walked out during this scene. Lynch remembers: 'By then, I knew the scene was killing the film. So I cut it to the degree that it was powerful but didn't send people running from the theatre.' In retrospect, he said: 'But that was part of what Wild at Heart was about: really insane and sick and twisted stuff going on.'
Wild at Heart was completed one day before it debuted at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival in the 2,400-seat Grand Auditorium. After the screening, it received 'wild cheering' from the audience. When Jury President Bernardo Bertolucci announced the film as the winner of the Palme d'Or at the awards ceremony, the jeers almost drowned out the cheers, with film critic Roger Ebert leading the vocal detractors. Gifford remembers that there was a prevailing mood that the media was hoping Lynch would fail. "All kinds of journalists were trying to cause controversy and have me say something like 'This is nothing like the book' or 'He ruined my book'. I think everybody from Time magazine to What's On in London was disappointed when I said 'This is fantastic. This is wonderful. It's like a big, dark, musical comedy'".
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) told Lynch that the version of Wild at Heart screened at Cannes would receive an X rating in North America unless cuts were made, as the NC-17 was not in effect in 1990, at the time of the film's release; he was contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated film. Lynch made one change in the scene where Willem Dafoe's character shoots his own head off with a shotgun. Gun smoke was added to tone down the blood and hide the removal of Dafoe's head from his body. Foreign prints were not affected. The Region 1 DVD and all Blu-rays contain the toned-down version of the shotgun scene.
Wild at Heart opened in the United States on August 17, 1990, in a limited release of only 532 theaters, grossing US$2,913,764 in its opening weekend. It went into wide release on August 31 with 618 theaters and grossing an additional $1,858,379. The film ultimately grossed $14,560,247 in North America.
Wild at Heart initially received mixed reviews from critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 66% based on 56 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.4/10. The site's consensus reads: 'One of director David Lynch's more uneven efforts, Wild at Heart is held together by his distinctive sensibilities and compelling work from Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.' On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 52 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating 'mixed or average reviews'.
In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of a possible four. He felt that Lynch "is a good director", but he was also bothered a few scenes of "particularly offensive violence" and possible undercurrents of racism and misogyny: "If [Lynch] ever goes ahead and makes a film about what’s really on his mind, instead of hiding behind sophomoric humor and the cop-out of 'parody', he may realize the early promise of his Eraserhead. But he likes the box office prizes that go along with his pop satires, so he makes dishonest movies like this one.' USA Today gave the film one and a half stars out of four and said: "This attempt at a one-up also trumpets its weirdness, but this time the agenda seems forced."
In his review for Sight & Sound magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, 'Perhaps the major problem is that despite Cage and Dern's best efforts, Lynch is ultimately interested only in iconography, not characters at all. When it comes to images of evil, corruption, derangement, raw passion and mutilation (roughly in that order), Wild at Heart is a veritable cornucopia.' Richard Combs in his review for Time wrote, "The result is a pile-up, of innocence, of evil, even of actual road accidents, without a context to give significance to the casualties or survivors". Christopher Sharrett, in Cineaste magazine, wrote: 'Lynch's characters are now so cartoony, one is prone to address him more as a theorist than director, except he is not that challenging...one is never sure what Lynch likes or dislikes, and his often striking images are too often lacking in compassion for us to accept him as a chronicler of a moribund landscape a la Fellini.' However, in Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote: 'Starting with the outrageous and building from there, he ignites a slight love-on-the-run novel, creating a bonfire of a movie that confirms his reputation as the most exciting and innovative filmmaker of his generation.'
Despite mixed initial reviews, Wild at Heart came to be viewed favorably in subsequent years. It was ranked the 47th best film of the 1990s in an IndieWire critics' poll, the 26th greatest film of the same period in a Complex poll, and the 53rd best in Rolling Stone's poll.
American Film Institute recognition: