Something Wild

Something Wild is the type of film many viewers today long for, a mid-budget comedy with reasonable stakes and a pleasing, laidback demeanor. There's nothing smug or selfish about the film; it's genuinely trying to please, and does so effortlessly, with broad appeal. It's got a great cast, including young up-and-comers Jeff Daniels, Ray Liotta, and Melanie Griffith, a greater director in Johnathon Demme, who would find his ultimate success in directing Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and a great script, which bends, twists, and contorts to give a new perspective every half hour or so. What an unexpected, merry pleasure.

The film follows Charles Driggs, played by Daniels, an uptight yuppie who meets Audrey Hankel, played by Griffith. Audrey is a wild child, and soon convinces stiff Charles to ditch work and follow her to the country to meet her mother and attend her class reunion. The arrival of Ray Sinclair, played by Liotta, complicates matters further. It's a comfortable, nestled film, mostly taking place over the course of only a day.

The film is smartly written and directed, but it lives and dies with its three principle leads, who each turn in great work. All three build their characters from the ground up, exaggerating their central traits just enough to deliver the essential character information throughout. The script has little time for backstory or introductions, relying on the mannerisms and body cues of the cast to fill the audience in. It's a bold approach, but it works. The film also steadily shifts in tone and tension, demanding subtle tweaks to each performance as the film plays. Again, the cast delivers flawlessly.

Speaking of the script, it's a dandy. The premise is thin on its surface (fun-loving girl meets yuppie, yuppie loosens up) and the potential for excess cliché or exposition is high. Something Wild sidesteps these pratfalls with ease, setting its focus tightly on its characters and exposing their psyches early and often. One of the most peculiar but exciting elements is the shift in tone throughout. It's steady and assured, motivated and appropriately weighted.

Motivations change organically too; characters grow plausibly, in the course of only a day, because the film works holistically. Character growth feeds into theme, theme feeds into style, style feeds into substance. Something Wild is intrinsically opposed to the banality of corporate life, 80s corporate life specifically, and this resistance to banality motivates the action and characters. It's understood without explicit statement - everyone needs something wild in their life eventually. Viewers will be hard pressed to disagree.

Something Wild is a cult classic with greatness all around and throughout. It's an easy-going film that ratches up the tension slowly and thrives within its own details. All three central characters would go on to fantastic careers, as would its director, and it's easy to see why. They're likeable and confident, charismatic and convincing. The film itself is a neat little encapsulation of the 80s trying to escape itself, sick of its own cowardice and corporate kowtowing. It's also a refreshing, skewed take on the machismo of the era, with an unexpected but earned payoff.

Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) is outwardly a stuffy businessman in NYC. He tries to dine and dash, but gets called out by Lulu/Audrey Hankel (Melanie Griffith). She sees him as a secret rebel. She offers to drive him back to his office but instead takes him on a wild trip. She's stealing and sleeping with the married Charles in a motel. She brings him back to visit her mother and go to the class reunion as Charles' wife. Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta) and his girlfriend Irene (Margaret Colin) show up at the reunion and take Charles and Audrey for a drive. Ray turns out to be Audrey's ex-con husband and he holds up a convenience store.

Melanie Griffith delivers one of the most memorable character in cinema. She's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before that term existed. She's also more three dimensional than that. Jeff Daniels is almost as good and shows his versatility. My main problem with him is the first half where he is supposedly a married man cheating on his loving wife. Instead of a compelling reveal later on, I would have started with Charles as a lonely non-married guy. It kept me from liking Charles and thinking that he's a lousy cheater. Ray Liotta is always great as a crazed maniac. It's a wild times.

Not even remotely corny like one would expect of a 1980s romantic comedy, this fierce, libidinous entertainment stars Jeff Daniels as Charlie, an externally button-down banker whose mojo is readily fluttered by audacity in women, and Melanie Griffith as Lulu, an alcoholic sex machine with an amply fertile mind. Daniels plays some of the same notes here that he used in Terms of Endearment, where he was the firm, competent, straitlaced husband and father who liked to have relations with perky coeds. He looks like he was born to wear a suit and a tie, but he has that insubordinate glint in the right light. Griffith's performance is founded not so much on sexual excitement as on nerve: She is able to persuade us, and Daniels, that she is likely to do almost anything, particularly if she thinks it might shock him.

Even while they're standing on the sidewalk in front of that restaurant and she's making like she's charging him with theft, there's a spark between them. The casting is critical in a movie like this. There has to be some kind of brutish cohesion between the man and the woman or it doesn't make any difference how sharp the dialogue is. Once they've made their connection, Daniels freely goes along for the ride. After awhile she even takes his handcuffs off, although he sort of liked the idea of having lunch in a restaurant with the cuffs dangling from one of his wrists.

They drive down the East Coast from New York to Tallahasee, while she steals money from cash registers and he capsizes into the conscious daydream of the sensually exhausted. At Griffith's high school reunion, Daniels runs into the last person he wants to see, the accountant from his office. And Griffith runs into the last person she wants to see, her husband, Ray Liotta. I will stop here. The uncertainty of the tension must not be ruined.

If Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye had developed this movie as a madcap comedy, it most likely wouldn't have worked as well. Their feat is to think their characters through before the very first scene. They know all about Charlie and Lulu, and so what happens after the confrontation outside that restaurant is virtually inescapable, cnsidering who they are and how they look at each other. This is one of those few movies where the story acts shocked by what the characters do, and not the other way around.

It's easy to take actors like Ray Liotta and Jeff Daniels for granted with the benefit of hindsight. Both of them have had ups and (horrible) downs, crossing genres seamlessly or inexplicably. It can also be argued that neither one of them has been more gratifying, more liberated, more, well, wild than in their breakthrough roles in Johnathan Demme's road movie. With the help of Melanie Griffith's femme fatale they make a very interesting movie about finding your wild side, but also finding out about the nasty underbelly lurking beneath society's pickett fences.

After being accused of ripping off a diner, a yuppie accountant named Charles sets off on a wild road trip with the free-spirited Lulu. Along the way she manages to bring out something special in Charlie, accusing him of being a closet rebel. They decide to get themselves in various troublesome situations, like running out on roof-splittingly expensive restaurants. They soon run into trouble, however, when a former love of Lulu's (or Audrey's), Ray, turns up at her high school reunion, after what appears to be done time in a jail.

Demme's film switches from screwball situation comedy to black farce and then to an uncomfortable menace. At times we're not really sure what this woman wants with Charles, whether she is after money, scheming, or indeed really has fallen for our floppy-haired protagonist. Daniels injects his hapless hero with all the dopey charm and middle-class wit one could ever hope to see in an 80s suit-wearing yuppie. He wants to eschew his suburban divorce style for a rebellious wild-at-heart rebel, and insists upon doing it with the impulsive, slightly reckless, but utterly alluring Lulu. The problem is, when he discovers his wild side, he has to deal with the ensuing problems: He's just been made Vice-President at his firm - What would his work mates think? How does he deal with the psychotic ex-con boyfriend? Does he really know what this woman wants? He appears, for most of the movie, to be a sap, who could fall for more than he could handle. But coincidentally, he's a pretty good liar, so maybe he's no better than the rest of them.

But even if the underlying philosophy doesn't hit you, then the comedic set-pieces definitely should. One particular scene involving handcuffs, suspenders, a dinky motel and a a phone call to his work office particularly sticks in the mind. It's not often you get movies like this. Movies that share a good balance between intelligence and farce. How can you go wrong?

Stiff and strait banker Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) meets sexy wild gal Audrey Hankel (Melanie Griffith) and quickly falls under her spell. Initially, and weakly protesting, he soon finds that her lifestyle adds the spark to his otherwise dull existence. However, things get troublesome when her violent ex-convict husband (Ray Liotta) shows up and announces that if he can't have her? Nobody can!

Something of a cult hit these days, Something Wild (directed by Jonathan "Silence Of The Lambs" Demme) has that nice trick of being able to pull us in early for the comedy, and then take us down a darker, but still comical, road. Daniels is always an affable and easy to watch actor, and nothing changes here, but it's Griffith and an early Liotta turn that steals the show. Griffith is a ball of sexuality, and she looks fabulous into the bargain. Her Audrey (AKA Lulu) has a few layers that need to be peeled by Griffith and she does it with style. Liotta serves notice of what was to come four years down the line when a certain Mr Scorsese came calling. Menacing yet fun into the bargain, it's very much the perfect Liotta role. Demme paints an interesting picture as he blends yuppiedom with rebellious excess, the result being a quirky little number that, save for an inevitability that comes with the finale, is a rewarding, time fulfilling experience. Margaret Colin, Tracey Walter, Su Tissue and Charles Napier join the principals in the cast, while the zippy 80s soundtrack contains cuts from some of the decades luminaries like New Order, Fine Young Cannibals & UB40. 7/10