I've seen WILD AT HEART several times. I've always found it to be the home a number of brilliant Lynchian episodes and elements. Each time out, I must say, I feel Lynch's Palme d'or winner is getting tighter and tighter and more and more cohesive.

Lula (Dern) and Sailor (Cage) are movie couple more passionately in love (& lust) with one another than any other couple in the movies. They have all the standard lovey-dovey dialog, to be sure, but they also share their childhoods with one another during pillow talk (Laura Dern has some twisted family acquaintances and Cage began smoking when he was four). Further pillow talk goes to bonkers, but somehow sincerely intended declarations of love ("Honey, when we're doing it, your cock just talks to me"). WILD AT HEART is a film where Lynch seems to want to raise the volume of every moment and feeling to 11, and this is one way how Lynch escalates the intensity of this couple's love.

WILD AT HEART, famous for its WIZARD OF OZ references and other quirks, uses Lynch's favourite to punctuate the road-movie/love-story with referential themes. Although not entirely clear what OZ has to do with anything, the couple seem to be on a journey home--wherever that may be. It's a sweet sentiment, and it ultimately works for me.

Lynch takes several exit ramps from this highway, and we get a lot of episodic moments--and most of them are weird as hell. There are a number of misses in here, for sure (Grace Zabriskie as the leader of a gang of assassins is way too much for me), but there are also purely legendary hits of random. Willem Dafoe's performance--uh, rather his fake teeth's performance--is creepy and quirky in proportions that hasn't quite ever been seen before, and meanwhile Crispin Glover's two minutes in a family flashback is absolutely wicked comedy gold.

Vive Cousin Dell. Brilliant.
B+