Word: noirishly
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...faced with stringing together the characters, who seem to exist in independent bubbles--very well-acted bubbles, but bubbles nonetheless. Phillip throws Sylvia to the ground, but he starts just--just--a little to early, and the moment is off. Some pauses adopt an almost film noirish mystery, instead of magnifying emotion...
...this: a mainstream American movie, rife with violent and often murderous behavior, yet so densely plotted, so richly peopled, that you can't summarize it in a sentence. Or a paragraph. Or several of them. Imagine, as well, a film set in the exotic past--Los Angeles in the noirish '50s--that tends to make the mass audience skittish. And imagine too a cast of terrific actors that lacks the reassuring presence of a megastar who can, as they say, open a picture...
...Lynch delivered. Wild at Heart is splendidly grotesque and mammothly entertaining -- the director's first for-sure comedy, Blue Velvet for laughs. The plot, from Barry Gifford's noirish novel, is your standard slice of poisoned American pie: a pair of loser-friendly lovers, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern), hit the road to escape Lula's mom and a phalanx of psychos who vividly illustrate Lula's contention that the "whole world's wild at heart and weird on top." But the picture is charged with so much deranged energy, so many bravura images, that...
...with similar subtlety. Kloves' delicacy as a writer is, moreover, matched by his restraint as a director. It would have been easy to patronize or satirize the less than fabulous milieu of The Fabulous Baker Boys. Instead he and his fine cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, have created a gently dislocating noirish mood -- not quite menacing but not exactly comfortable either -- and let it speak for itself...