It's like one of those episodes of 'Twin Peaks' that Lynch didn't direct - the ones that had everything except the master's transforming touch. He's trying to top himself, and as a result, the picture feels more like the work of a Lynch imitator than the genuine item. It's as if, for the first time, Lynch were trying to make a David Lynch movie. There are flashes of virtuosity in 'Wild at Heart,' but too much of what he's created here verges on self-parody.

It's not that Lynch has gone too far - he went just as far in 'Blue Velvet' - it's that he's gone wrong. But Lynch wants to explode the rules of the game without really understanding them. In 'Wild at Heart' - which Lynch adapted from a novel by Barry Gifford - the director is working with pulp conventions it's a road movie about a pair of seemingly doomed young lovers named Lula and Sailor (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage) on the run from the girl's hysterical mother (Dern's real mother, Diane Ladd). From the outset, just after the wondrously poetic opening credits, he seems to misstep. 'Wild at Heart,' though, is lacking in the dreamlike irrevocability of his most brilliant work. There's an ineffable potency and danger in them - they carry vibrations from the lizard realm - and, watching his films, we can be simultaneously repulsed and enthralled.

His images are projections straight from the bogs of the unconscious, and they make it onto the screen raw and undiluted, dripping wet. But 'Wild at Heart' isn't the David Lynch movie that anyone could have hoped for - not his new fans, who've discovered him through 'Twin Peaks,' or his older ones.Īt his best - in 'Eraserhead,' 'Blue Velvet' and the pilot for 'Twin Peaks' - Lynch achieves a fragile, almost godlike tone, where comedy and tragedy bleed together, and irony and passionate, obsessive sincerity are mixed in precisely equal portions. It's swampy and destabilizing in that subversive, perversely original, signature Lynchian way. David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart' is unlike anything that's ever been made before.

David lynch's wild at heart