Wild at Heart (1990)

Title: Wild at Heart (1990)

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie

“This World is Wild at Heart and Weird on Top” is the defining quote in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, this shouldnt surprise anyone considering how the strangeness of the world is one of David Lynch’s favorite themes, for example, he also addressed it in Blue Velvet (1986), another film that spoke about the dark strange underbelly of the world. Wild at Heart is a film about a couple trying to hide away from the craziness of the world, trying to run away from it. They desperately want happiness, and constantly look for it, but Lula and Sailor seem destined to failure somehow. Lula and Sailor both come from dysfunctional families, Sailor says he never had any “parental guidance” and Lula, well; she has the mother from hell. When we first meet Sailor, he is being picked up by Lula, on the day he is being released from jail, which immediately lets us see Sailor isn’t an angel; so we’re not exactly talking about two wholesome characters here.  Yet, these two trouble makers have true love for each other, it’s intense, pure, real, so much so that Lula is constantly afraid that something will “jinx” their happiness. The “strange world” is a constant threat to their blissfulness.

There are many scenes in Wild at Heart that are simply there to accentuate how strange the world is. For example, there’s this scene in which Lula and Sailor are staying on this motel in the middle of nowhere, and they decide to take some fresh air by having a drink with some of the tenants of the motel and boy, this group of people they meet are class-A, bonafide weirdoes! On top of things some people are shooting a porn film with obese women on one of the rooms of the motel and suddenly a bunch of obese naked ladies pop into the scene! That’s when it dawns on you that you’re in David Lynch land!  He also revisits the theme of an evil controlling mother figure in the form of “Lula’s Momma”, a.k.a. Marietta Fortune, played by an intense Dianne Ladd, she gets so psychotic at times! At one point she smothers her entire face in lipstick because she’s so angry! By the way, I’ll just make a quick note here and point out that Dianne Ladd plays Lula’s mother in the film, but she’s also Laura Dern’s real mom! So it’s one of those special occasions where real life mother and daughter get to work together on a film;  this parental connection between actresses brings an additional emotional impact to their performances; Lynch knew what he was doing. But just how weird is this movie you ask? Well, it's so weird that test audiences demanded the film to be trimmed down during a scene that is by far the epitome of weirdness; it's a scene between Grace Zabriskie and Harry Dean Stanton, it involves an orgasm and a murder, but I'll let you discover what that scene is all about for yourselves.   

One of the things that makes this film work so well is the chemistry between Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern; Lula and Sailor, wow, what a couple! They exude sensuality, love, and true devotion to one another, but they also have a rebellious edge to them. As a spectator, you know these two people are rebels and trouble makers, they love to hang out at heavy metal bars, dancing to the music of a band called ‘Power Mad’! Lula doesn’t listen to her momma even though Sailor is obviously bad news; you see, Sailor has a tendency towards bar fights and manslaughter! He is also the biggest Elvis fan which I'm sure had something to do with Nicholas Cage who is also himself a huge Elvis fan. In a way Lula and Sailor remind me of these classical rebellious couples like Mickey and Mallory from Natural BornKillers (1994), only less murderous and insane. Thing is that even though Lula and Sailor aren’t squeaky clean characters, you get to like them anyways, Lula comes off as slightly naïve, while Sailor is the quintessential bad boy with a heart of gold. They come off as the kind of couple that is perfectly in tune with each other, their respective lives going down the same exact rode. Their passion is often times alluded to through images of fire and heat, for example, while the two have sex, Lynch superimposes extreme close ups of matches being lit, cigarettes being smoked or entire houses burning down. When Lula gets aroused, she tells Sailor that she’s “hotter than Georgia asphalt”, so sensuality plays a big part on this film.

For some reason Lynch chose to mix Lula and Sailors story with an avalanche of references to The Wizard of Oz (1939), strangely enough it all fits perfectly with the story. For example, as Lula and Sailor run away from various things on their road trip, Lula imagines “the wicked witch of the west” following them closely behind, like an evil threat to their relationship; to make things worse, the wicked witch is her own mother! The Wizard of Oz references don’t stop there; there are talks of yellow brick roads, people wanting to go “somewhere over the rainbow”, even Toto figures into one of the conversations. It all makes perfect sense when we look at it from the perspective of the story, we can actually draw some interesting parallels between both films. For example, we could say that Lula and Sailor are going down the yellow brick road of life. Lula and Sailor have their very own wicked witch in the form of Lula’s over protective mother who looks at Lula through a crystal ball, a symbolism alluding to Lula’s momma watching every step Lula and Sailor take. The Wizard of Oz references go on all the way till the films end, so knock yourselves out trying to spot them!

The film is sprinkled with many cameos by actors who have participated in previous Lynch films, for example we get Jack Nance who played Henry in Eraserhead (1977), Isabella Rosellini who played Dorothy Vallens on BlueVelvet (1986) and Sheryl Lee who worked on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), so you’ll see a bunch of Lynch familiars, but you’ll also see a couple of faces that you’d never seen before on a Lynch film, the most notable one being Willem Defoe playing ‘Bobby Peru’, another outstanding villain in David Lynch’s Rogues gallery. At the end of the day, Wild at Heart is a road trip movie about two lovers trying as best they can to eliminate evil forces from their lives, two people just trying to be happy, but not being very good at it because as the film will constantly remind us, this world is overpoweringly weird and we can sometimes find ourselves unwillingly entangled in its strangeness weather we want it or not.

Rating: 5 out of 5    

Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage fooling around on the set 

My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done? (2010)

Title: My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done (2009)

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Defoe, Brad Dourif, Chloe Sevigny, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier

Review:

“Produced by David Lynch, Directed by Werner Herzog” where the only words I needed to read from the box at the video store. I immediately snatched this movie up, I knew I was up for something weird, bizarre, artistic. After all, these two legendary directors have always specialized in the strange and unusual through out their whole cinematic careers. So I immediately knew I was in for something interesting.

My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done is the story of Brad; a man who is near the brink of completely loosing it. And by loosing it I mean going absolutely bonkers. This guy isn’t ‘loosing it’ in the allegorical sense of the world. Nope, this guy is really going crazy! Brad is the quintessential underachiever; both he and his girlfriend are living with his mother, with no plans of moving out any time soon. His mother is driving him crazy. She’s the kind of mother who still treats her full grown son like a 12 year old. In an attempt to find some meaning to his life, Brad enlists in a drama class. Unfortunately, drama class only fuels his hatred for everything, and gives him ideas on how to go about murdering his own mother. Based on a real life story!

The Man, the myth, the legend, Werner Herzog

“Sometimes truth is stranger then fiction” this is a phrase that can aptly be used to describe the films of director Werner Herzog. Herzog has always been a director who enjoys blurring the lines between reality and fiction in his films. He looks for real life stories that are amazing, and then turns them into a film or a documentary. Or both. This was the case with the story of Dieter Dengler, a man who survived the horrors of war and lived to tell the tale. Herzog found the story so interesting that he made a documentary about it called Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997). Years later, Herzog made the film version of that story called Red Dawn (2006) starring Steve Zahn and Christian Bale. But his documentaries aren’t entirely reality; they always have something of fiction in them in a way. Sometimes he uses visuals in his documentaries to manipulate the audiences’ perceptions of what they are seeing. And the same can be said of his films, sometimes they are based on real life stories, but they don’t stick one hundred percent to the real story that they are based on. This blurring of the lines between reality and fiction continues yet again with My Son, My Son, a film which according to Herzog himself is 70 percent false or loosely made up. So we are not getting the story behind Mark Yavorsky’s dementia 100%. It’s a film loosely based on his life.

Mark Yovorsky is a man who murdered his own mother with a sword, he did time in jail for his crime, and now he is out. The writer of this film Herbert Golder had been interested in developing this story into a feature film for many years, interviewing Yovorsky, gathering information and finally, contacting Herzog himself so he could direct the film. Herzog agreed to make the film and at one point decided to visit Yavorsky’s trailer home, just so he could get a more realistic background for the character. Funny thing is that even though Herzog is known for making films filled with weird characters and situations, he was actually freaked out by the real life Yavorsky! He walked into the guys trailer home, and immediately decided to leave, he said to himself that being there just didn’t feel right. The guy freaked Herzog out, that’s how you know the guy has got to be crazy as hell! I mean, if you freak Herzog out, you know there’s something wrong with ya.

So anyhow, in the film, Mark Yavorsky is played by Michael Shannon who seems to be the current go to guy if you want a nutcase in your movie. Check out his performance in Revolutionary Road (2008) to see what I mean. But his performance on My Son, My Son is his most demented yet. He plays a guy who is really disconnected from society; an outcast. Brad is the kind of guy who hates everything he sees in the world, and therefore is always angry or upset. He goes into sudden bursts of anger and violence. He is preoccupied with the existence of god and with religion. He is definitely portrayed as a character whose mind has been distorted and corroded by Christianity. His questioning of reality, and god and the meaning of it all, has driven him to insanity. Shannon does a memorable performance, makes one think of those demented performances that Klaus Kinski used to do for Herzog. One has to wonder how Klaus Kinski would have played this role had he been alive and in his prime.

The definition of a disfunctional family

But Michael Shannon is no stranger to Herzog’s brand of bizarre cinema; he had worked previously with Herzog on Bad Lieutent: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). He isn’t the only Herzog regular on My Son, My Son. This film is filled with many Herzog and Lynch regulars. We have Brad Dourif (who has collaborated with Herzog on three occasions) playing Brads demented homophobic uncle. Dourif’s character lets us see just why Brad is so crazy, I mean with family members like these, who wouldn’t go nuts? The same can be said for Grace Zabriskie who plays Brad’s mom. She freaked me out in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Inland Empire (2006) her effect on this movie is pretty much the same. She still freaks me the hell out! The film is filled with a who’s who of eccentric character actors. Lot’s of odd looking faces. Both Lynch and Herzog enjoy using actors with odd features, which is why we get so many of them on this film. They united forces and gathered strange looking individuals from both of their usual gang of actors. As a result we get Willem Defoe (who’d collaborated with Lynch on Wild at Heart) and Chloe Sevigny, who is no stranger to bizarre cinema. Don’t believe me check her out in Gummo (1997). It’s no surprise she is known as the “queen of independent cinema”. We even have Udo Kier on this movie!

I have always liked Herzog’s attitude towards filmmaking. He doesn’t seem to believe in huge budgets and big stars. Actually, part of Lynch’s and Herzog’s attitude with this project was to make a “return to essential filmmaking”. Filmmaking that focuses on story, performances, and on saying something. Not on how big a budget is, or what big Hollywood star is in it. Both directors aimed to work with a low budget while still producing a high quality film. And I have to say they achieved it. Herzog has never been a director one would associate with horror films, I mean, the closest he ever got to that was when he made his Nosferatu (1979) remake. But with My son, My son, Herzog has made what he calls himself “a horror film without the gore, the chainsaws or the gore” and here comes the good part: “but with a strange anonymous fear creeping up on you” Amen to that Herzog! Amen to that!

Rating: 4 out of 5