Wild at Heart takes on a deranged tone and feverish temperature all
its own. The winner of the 1990 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie — equal
parts unhinged road trip and American Gothic head trip — follows the careening
love affair of Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket-clad Sailor and Laura Dern’s
gum-smacking Lula, two headstrong delinquents whose passion for one another is
“hotter than Georgia asphalt,” in the latter’s inimitable words.

Of course, love is
never easy, and in Sailor and Lula’s case it’s endangered by Lula’s psychotic
mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mom), who puts a hitman on Sailor’s scent
when they hit the road and elope — one of but several shady characters looking
to do them ill. Sexy, surreal and yet also strangely, almost indescribably
affecting, Wild at Heart is eminently
watchable because it shocks and disgusts even as it makes you laugh and lean
forward with tension. It’s also studded with some wonderful (and wonderfully
unsettling) supporting performances, notably from Willem Dafoe, Grace Zabriskie
and Cristin Glover. Most notable, however, is the brand new transfer and mix of
the movie, supervised by the notoriously meticulous Lynch himself. Cruddy VHS
tapes can now be slapped up on eBay, though why anyone would bother to bid on
them when taking a look at, say, the crisp improvements in the dark night
scenes set in Big Tuna is beyond me.

The disc’s extras are
headlined by a superlative and fairly comprehensive half-hour making-of documentary
that includes new interviews with Lynch, Cage, Dern, Gifford, Dafoe, Ladd,
Glover, director of photography Frederick Elmes and many more. “Leftovers” from
this main doc are then divvied up into nine more two- to four-minute segments
under the banner of “Del’s Lunch Counter.” A featurette on the “specific spontaneity” of Lynch’s
colorful, abstract direction, a music-set image gallery, a DVD introduction of
sorts from Lynch detailing the release’s color-timing and remixing process, the
theatrical trailer and several TV spots also follow.

There are the few
nagging issues left unfulfilled, particularly for hardcore Lynch fans. Some
sort of material on the film’s wonderful score and music — be it an interview
with frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti or the inclusion of either of the
two music videos for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” — would seem to have been a
no-brainer, but neither are anywhere to be found. Additionally, it’s always
slightly irritating when deleted and extended scenes are explicitly mentioned
and discussed in interview material, and then left out. But these
miscalculations of omission aside, Wild
at Heart is still a sterling catalogue release, with a flowchart of the
movie’s characters for your dunderheaded roommate and a nice slipcase to boot.
Now fans need only await a proper release of Lost Highway to bring Lynch’s oeuvre more fully up to the digital age. A-
(Movie) A- (Disc)