Something Wild
Jonathan Demme's yuppie-meets-rebel road-trip romance.
Something Wild (1986). Grade: B+
I was fairly well-known in high school as a sort of movie buff, and somebody asked me to recommend a movie for a weekend party they’d be having. Now, I really didn’t know a lot of modern movies, I mostly knew old ones; and what newer movies I knew were things like Broadcast News and Moonstruck, which didn’t seem like party movies to me (although I think Moonstruck would be fine as a party movie for older grownups today). So I suggested Something Wild.
The weekend passed, the party was held. Then, on Monday, one girl who’d attended said to me, rather disapprovingly, “umm… I wasn’t expecting handcuffs.” Yep, Jeff Daniels does get handcuffed to a bed! And it was the girl I had the biggest crush on, too! Oh, well.
I wouldn’t necessarily suggest Something Wild as a party movie, today. But looking at it again, I’m fine with the handcuffs!
It’s one of the rare sex scenes in 70s-90s movies that actually serves the plot; it tells you more about the characters. If I were making it today, I might have Melanie Griffith wear a sexy bra instead of making her be topless. But other than that, it’s not an exploitative scene.
I do have some problems with Something Wild, yet the sex isn’t one of them… and, overall, I still think it’s a pretty terrific movie.
The plot gets more complex as it goes, and I don’t want to spoil too many of the surprises, but here’s the gist of it. Straight-laced yuppie Jeff Daniels is having lunch at a busy NYC diner. When he gets the bill, he glances around, slips the bill into his pocket, and ducks out of the restaurant.
Melanie Griffith, who saw it, follows Daniels out of the diner. She accuses him of deliberately walking out on the bill. He pretends it’s a mistake and offers to pay. She tells him she doesn’t work there; she just noticed what he did. “Let me guess… Sometimes you don’t pay for your lunch. Or maybe you steal the occasional candy bar or newspaper. You’re a closet rebel.”
She offers to give Daniels a ride back to his office, and, intrigued, he accepts. But she doesn’t head for the office. Instead, she drives right on through the Holland Tunnel into Jersey. Daniels protests… feebly. He’s still intrigued. And we see the car exiting the tunnel:
And pretty soon, they’re at a cheap motel in Jersey. And the handcuffs come out!
As Pauline Kael put it in one of her best reviews, “The script—a first by a former NYU film student, E. Max Frye—is like the working out of a young man’s fantasy of the pleasure and punishments of shucking off middle-class behavior patterns.” … “‘Some years back … [director Jonathan Demme] said, in an interview in the now defunct Soho News, that “music was my first love; movies came second.’”
Demme had recently taken a walloping on his movie Swing Shift, about the women who replaced male factory workers during WWII; Demme wanted it to be a movie about the bonds between those women, star Goldie Hawn wanted it to be a love story. Of course, Hawn, who was the big name, won, and the movie was significantly re-shot and re-edited outside of Demme’s control; he called it the worst experience of his career.
So he went back to his first love, music; he filmed the fantastic concert movie Stop Making Sense, and made Something Wild. This is mix tape of a movie; there’s over 50 songs in it, many of them providing commentary on the characters and the setting. (I owned the soundtrack; this movie introduced me to the great band X, through their great song “The New World.”)
Roughly halfway through, there’s a key tonal switch; this movie has MULTIPLE tonal switches (and that, not the handcuffs, is why I don’t think it’d make a good party movie). All but one of them are expertly-handled.
In this scene, Daniels and Griffith (now with different hair, for Reasons) are at a dance; Daniels is finally relaxing, even getting a little goofy on the dance floor. The band is The Feelies, a New Jersey group that (as Sean Erickson’s fine article states) “had a semi-hidden talent as being one of New York City’s preeminent cover bands.” Here, they’re doing Bowie’s “Fame,” then switch to a Feelies original, “Loveless Love”:
Who’s that dark-haired, devil-eyed fellow at the end? It’s Ray Liotta! This was his first movie. (The dark-haired lady is Margaret Colin, who's wonderful, alas briefly.) That slow tracking shot is really masterful.
When we first see Griffith here, she’s in the dark black banged hairdo you see up on the top image; and her character’s name is Lulu. Regular readers might remember how we’ve seen another “Lulu” with hair like that before! It was Louise Brooks’s look in Pandora’s Box.
Pandora’s Box was definitely about how chasing after a loose woman can bring a man to ruin (although it’s not condemning the woman for being sexually active; it condemns the men for being slaves to their own weenies). And in Something Wild, Daniels falling for Griffith has its perils, too; it puts his nice cushy corporate job at risk.
Yet, in this case, that’s not shown as a step down for Daniels; it’s a liberation.
He’d only had one leading role before this (The Purple Rose of Cairo), but Daniels is an absolute delight here. His line readings, his double-takes and vocal tics are just perfect for the character. At one point, he thinks he’s lost his wallet — with his corporate credit cards in it — and declares, “I’m… F***ED” with absolute sincerity. Or the way he tries to be a detective skulking around bushes; or the way he changes his clothes in a gas station convenience store (with Steve Scales, the percussionist from Stop Making Sense, imploring him “attempt to be cool.”)
After seeing this, I basically wanted to BE the Jeff Daniels of the second half of this movie; the geeky, sweet-hearted, sharp-witted one wearing goofy clothes. And later, I’d want to be the similarly-styled Matthew Modine of Demme’s Married to the Mob (I had the soundtrack to that one, too). Although anyone who knows me knows I’m really not a quirky fun guy, I wanted to be that guy! And it probably helped me loosen up quite a bit.
Griffith is asked simply to be capital-H Hot here in the beginning, and she is (Kael wrote “has anybody ever looked better in smeared lipstick?”) But she’s got some tough tonal changes to pull off, too, becoming more emotionally and physically vulnerable as the story goes. Which she nails; this was probably her finest role (and maybe it was for Daniels, although he’s been terrific as a character actor in smaller parts for decades).
Ray Liotta is as menacing as ever, and there’s fine contributions from Dana Preu (as Griffith’s mom), Jack Gilpin (as one of Daniels’ co-workers), plus a host of Demme bit-part regulars; Charles Napier, Robert Ridgely, Tracey Walter, Kenneth Utt. Even a few fellow directors in John Waters and John Sayles (a used-car salesman and a motorcycle cop, respectively). David Byrne’s mom and Jonathan Demme’s mom play two ladies running a used-clothing store.
The cinematography by Tak Fujimoto is understated yet subtly terrific; he’d go on to shoot movies like Miami Blues and Devil in a Blue Dress, and they also look very good. John Cale and Laurie Anderson provide the low-key score (when there’s a score at all; again, most of the music is from pop culture tunes).
There was a real Culture Snob side to Demme, one that would surface strongly later in movies like Rachel Getting Married; the idea that people who live the perfect multicultural urban hipster lifestyle are the Good People and others are The Bad. (It wasn’t present in Demme’s earlier films, like Melvin and Howard, which showed poor rural culture in a nonjudgmental way.) I’m fine with multicultural hipsters; but liking cool music and cool culture does not necessarily make you a cool cat. I mean, Paul Ryan loved working out to Rage Against The Machine. Would Daniels be a neat guy here if his firm was bankrupting retirement funds, but hey, he’s got great taste in reggae?
Which is one of my problems with the ending — who is Daniels gonna be, now? It’s a happy ending, but I don’t believe in it lasting. If anything, I expect he’ll be dumped in two months and go running back to rejoin his corporate job at 75% his old salary (like Albert Brooks in Lost in America). But, still, this is something of a fantasy/dream movie, so I can accept the ending.
What I really dislike is the thriller-style climax. It makes sense for the characters, you can believe that it happens… it’s just so heavy and tense, it doesn’t belong in this movie. And I don’t like the way it’s resolved. I wish it were resolved by a security guard that our character had hired, something like that, or the police being next door and hearing the commotion.
That said, the very finish is satisfying. And the end credits with Sister Carol East rhyming her way along to her own reggae/hip-hop version of “Wild Thing” are wonderful. It’s the song that just had to be in this movie, given the title. And it is, twice.
This movie barely made its money back. Orion didn’t know how to market something with so many sides to it; part comedy, part romance, part road movie, part suspense movie. Maybe nobody knew how to market it. Here’s two foreign-language posters, presumably created by different distribution companies in those countries:
Note how the French one is kinda elegant, if a little mysterious… while the German one is just going for… well, an audience with a VERY particular set of tastes, shall we say.
Going back and revisiting the old Demme (before he went strictly commercial with Silence of the Lambs) has been fun for me; I still remember why I liked his movies so much. There’s just so much attention to the little details, like the hat tip some old codger gives a character in a country diner. Demme’s movies from this period feel like a reflection of the real world, and an appreciation of the variety in it. It was a warm vision that he’d lose later (although it comes back a little in a few scenes of his documentary Man From Plains, about Jimmy Carter).
So if you don’t know your old Demme, check out Melvin and Howard, or this movie. You’ll likely enjoy one, and possibly both. And you don’t need to bring handcuffs to your next party. Unless you want to.