Elvis Goes to Oz: “Wild at Heart”

 I watched Wild at Heart in memory of the late Diane Ladd: it was one of three films for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, though she never won the statuette. In 1974, she first earned a chance at Oscar glory for her supporting role as a feisty diner waitress (“Kiss my grits”) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She was nominated a second time in 1990 for Wild at Heart, and then a third time a year later for Rambling Rose. Remarkably, in the latter two films she played opposite her real-life daughter, the very talented Laura Dern. (There’s a Roger Corman connection too—Laura, born in 1967, was apparently conceived while her parents were on location, shooting Corman’s biker classic, The Wild Angels.)

 Wild at Heart was written and directed by David Lynch, who had burst into the public consciousness in 1986 with Blue Velvet. In that provocative film, which explored the perverse underbelly of an apparently wholesome mid-western town, young Laura Dern (about 17 at the time) played a schoolgirl whose sunny naïveté is in marked contrast to the perverse doings going on all around her. She was again to star for Lynch four years later, but in a highly different role. In Wild at Heart, Dern plays Lula Pace Fortune, a North Carolina cutie simply oozing with sexuality. Her man is Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a ne’er-do-well Elvis Presley enthusiast who treasures Lula even more than he does his genuine snakeskin jacket. Soon after the film begins, he’s carted off to prison, but when he returns it’s Lula he wants most. And the bulk of the film becomes their odyssey through the American South, heading for the distant dream of California.

 I hardly anticipated that this film is an unlikely nod to Dorothy and her friends easing down the Yellow Brick Road. (Instead of walking, the lovers cruise in a gaudy convertible, but the far-off Emerald City shines brightly in their eyes.) Of course an Oz story needs a Wicked Witch, and that’s where Diane Ladd comes in. As shrill socialite Marietta Fortune, she’s determined to separate daughter Lula from her lover, and it’s only gradually that we fully understand why. A widow, Marietta has several useful local men at her beck and call, and her intentions are hardly honorable.

 Though the film’s Oz references do not overwhelm the story, they give it a fanciful quality that sets it apart from darker Lynch projects. Nor does it fit tonally into the familiar “lovers on the lam” film genre, which encompasses grim dramas like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, as well as such older classics as They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). It’s fun to spot the Ozian allusions, which include ruby slippers, a big pink bubble, and a real-life oversized Munchkin. True, Wild at Heart is not without its moments of graphic Lynchian mayhem. But its violence is of the comic book variety. And the ending is one that Lynch himself considered happily ever after, with true love conquering all, even wicked witches. (This was a marked change from the conclusion of the novel on which the film is based.)

 To the surprise of many (including critic Roger Ebert), Wild at Heart was cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, and received the prestigious Palme d’Or. Back at home, though,  Lynch learned his flick would be X-rated if cuts were not made. What I saw on DVD was still pretty wild. It may be perverse, but I liked encountering a “Dorothy” who could emphatically declare, “You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  

 

David Lynch Sings the Blues

I’d never say that the films of David Lynch are favorites of mine. They’re rather too puzzling and too macabre to make me want to watch them more than once. Still, Lynch’s recent death seent me back to the film that cemented his reputation in the film world. So I sat down and watched Blue Velvet, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1986. 

Lynch shot Blue Velvet after he’d already made a truly bizarre body horror indie (Eraserhead), a screen adaptation of a Broadway costume-drama (The Elephant Man), and a big-budget space opera (Dune). Following the latter serious but doomed effort to crank out a film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Lynch leapt at the chance to do something more intimate. As his acclaimed TV series, Twin Peaks, would later show, Lynch was fascinated by the hidden corners of small-town America, the dark secrets behind the sunny facades. Blue Velvet begins (to the syrupy tune of the Bobby Vinton pop hit) with glimpses of happy Americana: cheery flowers blooming, an off-duty fireman waving at the locals from his truck, a neat row of clean-cut school kids crossing a street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Then suddenly the man collapses to the ground, and we realize that Middle America isn’t all sunbeams and rosebuds. (Ironically, at this early point we’ve already caught a glimpse of the fallen man’s wife, curled up on a comfy couch to watch a TV episode in which somebody is pointing a gun.) 

The hero of the story turns out to be Jeffrey, the son of the injured man. As played by Kyle MacLaughlin (who’d starred as Paul Atreides in Lynch’s version of Dune), Jeffrey’s a handsome and well-meaning fellow, home from college because of his father’s accident. Taking a walk in his neighborhood, he comes across a startling sight: a severed human ear. That’s when he can’t resist doing some sleuthing of his own. It quickly includes his neighbor, a pretty blonde high schooler named Sandy (Laura Dern), who jumps at the chance of playing Nancy Drew. 

What they discover is a side of Lumberton, their cozy home town, that they hadn’t anticipated. There’s a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) with a masochistic streak, a psychopathic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper) with rape on his mind, and a weirdly effeminate creep (Dean Stockwell) who’s into karaoke. And, of course, a guy with a missing ear. The clean-cut Jeffrey can’t resist getting mixed up in all of this, acknowledging with fascination that “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”

The curious thing about Blue Velvet is that, despite a good deal of grotesque violence, the movie ends on an upbeat note. Jeffrey and Sandy are a happy couple, Dad is well again, flowers are blooming against a bright blue sky. It’s as though none of the ugliness we’ve just seen has ever happened. Still: those flowers look suspiciously phony, as does the chirping bird (a callback to Sandy’s earlier romantic dream of happiness) that perches outside the window of the family kitchen. And look! Isn’t that a worm in its beak? 

Blue Velvet will never be in my personal pantheon of truly great movies. I’ve liked other Lynch films better because I’ve found their characters more appealing: see, particularly, Wild at Heart (which stars Dern again, with Nicolas Cage). And the conundrums in later Lynch films like Mulholland Drive seem more worth figuring out. Still, Blue Velvet paved the way for the rest of Lynch’s important career. And it’s fun to see Isabella Rossellini wearing something other than a nun’s habit. 

 

Rocketman: Jake Gyllenhaal Reaches for the Stars in “October Sky”

Some people’s lives seem just destined to be a movie. Take Homer Hickam, a teenager whose life was unended when—along with other residents of tiny Coalwood, West Virginia—he watched Russia’s Sputnik 1 pass overhead in October 1957. Mesmerized by the possibilities of space travel, he gathered some friends and some rudimentary equipment, then started to experiment with rocketry on a larger and larger scale. None of this pleased his father, a much-respected superintendent at the local coal mine, who expected his son to someday follow in his own footsteps. But the local science teacher, an ebullient young woman, believed in the ambitions  of the amateur rocketeers, She foresaw that if they could capture first prize at the county science fair, they would earn a trip to a national convention in far-away Indianapolis. The end result, she hoped, would be college scholarships for four bright lads who (not being good at football) had no other hope of paying for college educations.

 There were, needless to say, ups and downs, including a brief tangle with the law when the four  were accused of setting off a forest fire with one of their experiments.  All of this was set down in Rocket Boys, a best-selling 1998 memoir by Hickam, who grew up to be a NASA engineer charged with training astronauts. He’s covered other aspects of his eventful life in additional books, crafted a Rocket Boys musical, and also tried his hand at writing fiction.  Clearly he's a man of many talents, and one who’s also been blessed with a lot of good luck. After all, he could easily have spent his life, as so many of his friends and neighbors did, slogging away in a coal mine. And dying, as his father did, of black lung disease.

 When words on a movie screen note that the film we’re about to see is “based on a true story,” we’re always entitled to a certain amount of disbelief. And so I watched October Sky, the 1999 film that evolved out of Rocket Boys, with a certain sense of skepticism. (Sidenote: the title October Sky, which points to the impact of Sputnik passing over that West Virginia town, is an anagram of Rocket Boys. Why? I have no idea.)  Though I enjoyed this modest film thoroughly, its story seemed a bit too good to be true. Were the boys of Big Creek High School really taken in hand by a pretty and dedicated teacher, one who was secretly dying of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma? Did Homer’s strict but loving father, who disapproved of his son’s rocketry “hobby,” really stay away from every one of the early rocket test launches, even though the rest of the town turned out en masse to see what the boys were up to? Did that same father finally show up for the triumphant final launch, and find himself given the honor of pushing the button that ignited the rocket? According to Hickam’s own commentary, this is exactly what happened. (By the same token, he encourages fans to read a more complicated version of his story in Rocket Boys.) 

 The age-appropriate Jake Gyllenhaal—then barely 19--broke into the Hollywood mainstream with his portrayal of Homer. Laura Dern played the inspirational teacher who hides her personal woes from her students. The key role of Homer’s father was played by Chris Cooper, who’s always convincing as a tough but tender blue-collar guy. Other players were unfamiliar to me, but all showed their comfort with an authentic-sounding West Virginia twang. Following your dreams into space: what a nice theme for a family-centric movie.