A POST-CIVILIZED LOVE-STORY
Palme d'Or at Cannes 1990, David Lynch's Wild At Heart is on my short list of perfect films -- films that, whatever their genre, are without flaw. WAH is based on a fairly awful short novel by Barry Gifford, which Lynch has turned into a passionate love-story in a post-civilized world. As someone wrote about Emily Brontë's scene of Heathcliff's death, twenty centuries of civilization have disappeared without a trace. What is left is cars, junk, evil, death ---- and true, great, incandescent love. This is a world where transcendent music is Elvis, and where the only religion is the Wizard of Oz. Evil, pictured as baroquely as only Lynch knows how, surrounds the lovers but cannot defeat them. Nicholas Cage, in what may be his best-ever role, as Sailor Ripley, and Laura Dern, than whom nobody has ever made tall and skinny look sexier, as Lula, are betrayed, seduced, beaten but gloriously unbowed. Evil is everywhere: Lula's mother (Diane Ladd), who together with her lover Santos killed her husband, Uncle Pooch who raped Lula when she was thirteen, Santos himself, Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe in his creepiest role, with dental work that has to be seen to be -- perhaps -- believed), sadistic twins both played by Isabella Rossellini (one of them a maniac with a leg-brace), and behind it all the deceptively benign Mr Reindeer with his silver-dollar contract messages and his youthful harem. None of it makes much sense, but then true evil doesn't. It always negates sense or outstrips it. Only love counts. Oh, and the Wizard of Oz. And Elvis. What is astonishing is that it works, from violent beginning, through roller-coaster middle, to a final fade-out embrace on top of a traffic jam. It is a fairy-tale, which is why the violence, though wild and creepy, is not unbearable: it is the evil of the wicked witch, the wicked wolf in the forest, or the ogre in the mountains. It is the least morose of post-civilized films: love abides, and wins.