“Wild At Heart” (1990)
In “Wild at Heart,” Sailor (Nicolas Cage) wears a snakeskin jacket which, in his words, represents a “symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom” and Lulu (Laura Dern) is the kind of woman whose sexuality radiates off the screen; you want to run away with her, no matter the consequences. David Lynch‘s lovely, bizarre riff on the lovers-on-the-run genre, which Lynch worked on after he finished the pilot for his acclaimed series “Twin Peaks,” turned a few heads (and stomachs) when it was initially released. This is one of those “booed at Cannes” movies where you can almost understand the response, especially in the sequence where Lula and Sailor kiss over the smoldering neck wound of someone they had just decapitated with a shotgun blast. But this is a no-holds-barred outlaw movie in all of its parole-breaking glory, featuring two characters who are on the run from the law and a host of underworld baddies (most memorably Willem Dafoe‘s Bobby Peru). There are a number of unforgettable, incredibly weird flourishes that act like the inside jokes that a close couple shares: the Elvis Presley songs, the overt “Wizard of Oz” allusions, and the oftentimes uncomfortable marriage of sex and violence. This is a movie where Crispin Glover puts live cockroaches in his underwear and Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother, appears in stark close-up, smearing lipstick all over her face (she was Oscar-nominated here). “Wild at Heart” is wonderfully picaresque, darkly funny and totally unique, and so is just as powerful as any other Lynch masterwork, amongst whose number it can comfortably be counted. [A-]
Honorable Mentions
Proof positive that the genre is nearly as old as the medium and spans continents and styles, Swedish pioneer Victor Sjöström made silent film “The Outlaw and his Wife” back in 1918, which tells the story of an 18th Century Icelandic outlaw who falls in love with the landowning widow he works for, and who, on being found out, takes to the hills with her. All sorts of melodrama ensues as they have a child (whom she tosses over a cliff to evade bandits!), get involved in a love triangle and eventually freeze to death in each other’s arms (Intertitle: “Their Love was their only law”). Unfortunately the dreadful quality of our copy doesn’t do justice to what was, at the time, called “the most beautiful film in the world.”
Elsewhere there were many titles we couldn’t get to for space/time reasons. There seems to have been a worldwide glut in the early-to-mid ’90s—Kelly Reichardt‘s debut “River of Grass” is a Jarmusch-indebted loose-limbed film from 1994 that is more promising than truly impressive, while Gregg Araki‘s “The Living End” (1992) is a gay take on the theme in which an odd couple, both HIV positive, take off after killing a cop. Widely considered a founding film of New Queer cinema, it casts the grim circumstances almost as a nihilistic comedy to the frequent refrain “Fuck the world,” and Araki would revisit the genre, again in kitschy, gonzo style, a few years later with “The Doom Generation” (subtitled “A Heterosexual Film by Gregg Araki”) starring Rose McGowan. Michael Winterbottom‘s 1995 “Butterfly Kiss” worked a lesbian/bisexual angle, while less controversial (depending on how you feel about Renee Zellweger) was 1994’s “Love and a.45,” another set-in-Texas-heading-for-the-border go-round. Drew Barrymore also worked out her late-teen troubles in not one but two lovers-on-the-run films: 1992’s “Guncrazy” and 1995’s “Mad Love,” neither of which are much cop.
1940’s “Contraband” might be a film by the venerable duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, but Conrad Veidt (normally a villain) can’t really cut it as a leading man and the movie is kind of sawdust dry (though our Powell & Pressburger retrospective puts forth a different opinion), while Godard wasn’t the only Nouvelle Vague-er to embrace the genre: Francois Truffaut’s “Mississippi Mermaid” also stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, along with Catherine Deneuve, and, like “Pierrot le Fou,” at least part of it details the stresses that life on the run can put on a love affair, usually as a result of the woman becoming restless and longing for a more luxurious lifestyle. And two more recent, skewed visions that loosely fit the paradigm of a couple pursued by the authorities are Ben Wheatley‘s brilliantly dark “Sightseers” and Wes Anderson‘s adorable “Moonrise Kingdom,” but we’ve written about both ad nauseam recently elsewhere.
We also tried to avoid films that may feature a love-on-the-run subplot, but are mostly classified as something else, like sci-fi, in the case of downbeat-but-fascinating “Code 46” and the glossy-but-uninteresting “The Island,” or heist film, in the case of the Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty-starring “Dollars.” Also 1974’s “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” has some of the right elements, but is really just one long car chase, and as exactly as awesome/wearying as that sounds. Francois Ozon‘s “Criminal Lovers” also fits in here, as, despite a fleeing-from-police ending it’s more a dark, psycho-sexual thriller along the way, and despite our best efforts we just didn’t manage to track down two interesting-sounding Japanese entries in time: 1999’s “Adrenaline Drive” and the fantastically Japanese-ified title “Jeans Blues: No Future” from 1974. 1996’s Keanu Reeves/Cameron Diaz turkey “Feeling Minnesota,” however, doesn’t appear on the main list because we simply couldn’t induce anyone to write about it. Weigh in on any of our inclusions or exclusions or OMG HOW COULD YOU FORGET X oversights below. – Jessica Kiang, Rodrigo Perez, Erik McClanahan, Drew Taylor, Mark Zhuravsky, and Katie Walsh.