Rent Wild at Heart (1990)

Poor acting - Wild at Heart review by Alain

The acting in this film is the major obstacle to it being good. The universe created by David Lynch is very peculiar at best and takes some getting used to, but I get that. Although it is unnerving, it is strangely appealing.

However there is no excuse for the acting. I just don't understand how this can be considered a masterpiece with such poor acting performances.

Very David Lynch - Wild at Heart review by CW

Saw this years ago and wanted to revisit and hear the wonderfully dark moody music again. Some of the same actors as in other Lynch movies including the mother daughter team of Diane Ladd and Laura Dern. David Lynch seemed to like downplaying the beauty of Isabella Rossellini. The usual flat acting that one sees in other Lynch movies, part of his storytelling. Willem Dafoe plays the most incredibly scary thug, chilling to watch plus he is made up to have absolutely vile teeth to enhance the character. Story of mostly vile low life characters with few redeeming qualities. Enjoyed but don’t need to see again. 

Unique Melodrama - Wild at Heart review by GI

This lurid melodrama from David Lynch is a mixture of nightmarish road movie, romance and thriller with his trademark analysis of America that is both surreal, repulsive and in its details very realistic. Obsessed with the world of the nightmare Lynch even uses the iconography of The Wizard of Oz (1939), arguably the most famous narrative built on a dream, to showcase his array of grotesque characters. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play Sailor and Lula, young lovers obsessed with each other. Sailor has a criminal past and Lula, raped as a child, is under the obsessive and psychotic protection of her mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd - Dern's actual mother). When they run off together Marietta hires a private investigator to track them down but impatient for results she also brings in a gangster, who is in love with her, to find them and kill Sailor. The warped love story here is littered with shocking violence, graphic sex and bizarre side episodes that may be baffling if you're not experienced with Lynch films. All the characters have an almost unreal theatricality to them that highlights America as a circus of freaks from Willem Dafoe's quite scary and repulsive Bobby Peru to Isabella Rossellini's Perdita with her very weird eyebrows! A film that will stay in the memory I guarantee and it marks Lynch as a filmmaker to be ranked highly, he's original and unique so his films are always worth checking out. Here too you get Cage before he'd decided to make endless throw aways and Dern's performance will shock especially if you're only familiar with her from the likes of Jurassic Park (1993).