Kritiken

When Sailor (Nicolas Cage) mounts the hood of his sweetheart's Cadillac and serenades her with "Love Me Tender," the superficiality of the reference to badboy Elvis Presley movies achieves a sort of extradimensional poignancy: the characters live in a plastic world, of Wizard of Oz witches, barroom brawls, lipstick-smeared killer moms, Texas hitmen, and middle of nowhere, beer-supping hillbillies, so it's suitable that their reunion and redemption might too be plastic.

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) 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.

The power of David Lynch's Wild at Heart is the endurance of an Elvis Presley song (or two), the staying power of a children's movie, and the sight and sound of a match being struck: romantically mellow, wackily comic, and deadly, darkly serious.

Wild At Heart isn't so loose-limbed that it seems "discovered" in the process of making it; as usual, Lynch wields too much control over the film to let that happen. But the wide-open format of a road movie gives Lynch's imagination room to roam—maybe too much room, in certain instances—and the dark forces that close around its romantic heroes make it feel like a convertible gunned deeper into an encroaching nightmare.

The Frankenstein monster created by this attitude is fully visible in Wild at Heart, and looked at more than superficially, it's a pretty appalling sight to behold. As story-telling, the movie is so inept that you may have to see the movie twice in order to get the story straight (though most of it proves to be childishly simple). As poetry, the movie is so preoccupied with sleaze and gratuitous lunatic walk-ons that it's often about as subtle as Pink Flamingos.