The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 9-15
Wild at Heart (1990)
Directed by David Lynch
Lynch’s road-trip fantasy is of a piece thematically with his preceding feature Blue Velvet and his concurrent TV series Twin Peaks, both being similarly black-comic exposés of the evils lurking underneath ostensibly innocent American iconography. Unlike those works, though—which at least had some earthly grounding to support surrealistic flights of fancy—Wild at Heart goes all-out with the stylization, especially in many of the actors’ broadly exaggerated performances. As ever with Lynch, however, the inner romantic shines through even his most perverse and parodic gestures. Tellingly, it’s Lula (Laura Dern) who first despairingly utters the words of the film’s title: “The world is wild at heart and weird on top.” Wild at Heart is a love story, sure, but it’s also a coming-of-age tale of sorts, as Lula, through this forbidden road trip, sees and experiences horrors that shatter the innocence that her monstrously overprotective mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother) has tried so hard to maintain. And yet, she and her love for Sailor (Nicolas Cage) endures. Sailor’s concluding rendition of “Love Me Tender” encapsulates Wild at Heart’s sincere/ironic duality: It’s as cheekily goofy as it is achingly passionate. Kenji Fujishima (December 13, 8:15pm; December 15, 4pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Lynch/Rivette”)
