Something Wild

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source: Something Wild

I saw this when it first came out, twenty years ago, during the fad for "Yuppies in peril" films. It hasn't stood the test of time very well. The plot is strong, and not entirely incredible. There are good performances from Melanie Griffith and Ray Liotta. But I cannot see what the film is trying to do for its audience. Is it trying to make us laugh? To make satirical points? To make us feel that tragedy and danger are just a chance meeting away? Practically every character is dishonest to some degree. There is no-one to like here, and no-one to really fear, either – Liotta has his moments of menace, but really he's just a small-time crook. There is physical as well as moral ugliness. Perhaps this is deliberate, but cinematically it is dull: Demme finds no delight in his surroundings, apart from some attractive shots of the New York skyline. (The views of the Twin Towers now lend a prelapsarian feel very much at odds with the film's content.) When you consider the magic that Demme wrought in Stop Making Sense two years earlier, this is an unaccountable failing. The other failing is an excess of that American whimsy – of imposed rather than inherent eccentricity – that makes an entire genre in itself (True Stories. The Royal Tenenbaums). Too many of the characters seem to be saying: "Look at me, ain't I kooky?" Well they ain't – they've just been landed with a flawed screenplay. The soundtrack – assembled by John Cale and Laurie Anderson – is probably the best thing about the film, but even that is competent rather than enthralling. Four out of ten.

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.

This is the type of useless garbage that melonie griffith revels in because she thinks acting is showing off your tits and ass is what it takes and ray liotta makes a perfect ex husband because he is always psycho... lies and deceit are not good morals.

This movie really keeps you going without knowing what's coming around the corner. Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith were terrific together and Ray Liotta added a great dark side to the comedy of Daniels and Griffith. What looked like a strange love story turned into the strangest ending which kept my interest right to the end. Great movie which showed Daniels and Griffith are good actors. Have seen this movie at least 15 times and still love it!!!!

Sometimes you have to search high and low, but you really can find some interesting films made in the late 1980s. Though Jonathan Demme's film is not perfect, it still brilliantly outshines most of the crud made back then. Something Wild is the study of two souls who seem to come from different worlds going on a crazy road trip full of sex, violence, and even a high school reunion. It all begins inside a tiny diner in New York City when openly free-spirited Audrey (Melanie Griffith) notices yuppie Charlie (Jeff Daniels) sneak out on paying his bill. She confronts him outside, and the two of them end up jumping in her car and taking off on a sunny Friday afternoon. At first it would seem that this trip across the state line will merely end in a sexual tryst in a cheap motel, but little does Charlie know, Audrey has all sorts of plans for him that weekend. After some serious hanky-panky, Audrey takes Charlie back to her home town, introduces him to her mother as her husband, and then takes him to her high school reunion. In a development a little bit contrived for this critic's liking, one of Charlie's co-workers also happens to be attending this reunion. This could potentially destroy the facade of the family man on a wild weekend that Charlie is trying to perpetrate. (at this point we learn his wife left him quite a while ago) Further complicating matters is the arrival of Audrey's psychotic ex-husband, played with fearsome intensity by Ray Liotta. From that point on, this film which has largely gone for laughs, becomes rather intense and often violent. This film scores major points by absolutely keeping the audience guessing. At least until the third act when the film can likely conclude in no other way than it does. The film avoids making Charlie out to be a totally predictable sap who is just along for a wild ride with a crazy woman. Charlie has his own secrets, and a whole hidden side of his own that comes out when it has to. Demme places some marginally famous people in some truly odd cameos, and spends a little bit more time with peripheral characters than some people would. It gives the film a very "human" kind of feeling as we get to know at least a little something about even someone working as a waitress or at a motel. The film maybe meanders a bit here and there, but that is understandable since so much of it plays out like a road trip. The actors are exceptional, and the film is full of color and energy. Highly recommended. 9 of 10 stars. The Hound.

Rewatching Something Wild recently some 30 years after I first saw it, I was struck by how vividly the craziness of the story stayed in my memory, but also how surprising and unexpected the plot turns were. This is a good sign that that someone took time to craft an excellent plot. In fact, the film makers have lavished tender loving care on every aspect of this film and given it a lot of heart. Melanie Griffith does everything but set the screen on fire as she takes Jeff Daniel's humdrum office worker life and turns it upside down. We're then taken on a helter-skelter anything-goes trip where the couple leave the city and the staid conventions of middle class life behind as they plunge into a passionate affair and journey deep into the comforting familiarity of small town America with its motels, folksy shops and and kindly people. Ironically this is where the greatest danger lurks in the shape of old flame Ray Liotta, grinning maniacally and flipping the madcap whimsy into insane violence. Every minor character on this trip fills you with good vibes, in sharp contrast to the sinister kind of twist that current-day Hollywood mainstream gives to bit players. The soundtrack, for fans of 80s music, is fantastic - you're bound to hear stuff you haven't heard for ages. This film works on many levels: the actors are charming and charismatic, and their parts are well and sympathetically written. It's a loving memoir of a materialistic decade that many thought was money-obsessed but was filled with many hapless characters like this reviewer who lived similar episodes in their own lives: except not so wild!

I truly love this movie when I need to totally vanish from real life for a couple of hours. I wholeheartedly agree with the comments about how it goes from fun to serious almost seamlessly, but one part has been overlooked. The visit to Audrey's mother, Peaches, is almost abrupt in its quietude ("Don't call me Lulu, call me Audrey" changes everything), and it makes you wonder how Audrey became as free-spirited as she is. Peaches is no dummy, either... she reads right through Charlie with an air of a woman resigned to never really knowing her daughter. This little visit is the bridge between the fun and scary, the surreal and frighteningly real, and asks more questions than it answers... which works perfectly.

Why can't more romantic comedies be like this? This question came to me while watching Something Wild, a little sleeper from the mid 80s from Jonathan Demme about a seemingly typical 80s NY businessman, Charlie (Jeff Daniels) who gets whisked away by a 'free-spirit' "Lulu" (Melanie Griffith). Well, probably because most people who watch the very typical romantic comedies probably don't watch it for the same reasons that those who love Something Wild do. There's maybe something to keep going through the dirge of crap that are among the films of decades and decades of romantic comedies, but it's finding one of the nuggets that counts (Love Actually, from 2003, is another one for example). And, perhaps, there might be a darker sensibility, or more thought put into it, in enjoying Something Wild. It's a lot like Id-gone-Wild, in a sense. In the world of Something Wild, we're brought along with characters on a situation that would seem surreal on a Bunuel level (i.e. bourgeois brought along into the realm of sin and desire by some free-will temptress of the 'lower depths'), but there's a reality to it, a kind of down-to-earth level about the characters- and, more importantly for this, the actors playing them- and it elevates it past being either too strange or just too quirky. It's just about right, which is tough to dol you feel like cringing as Lulu calls up Charlie's boss while teasing him incredibly in the midst of kinky sex, but it's also so funny in how it all comes together that you just don't care, at least, enough, that it's anarchic. So while it's enjoyable, at least on first sight, as a sort of freewheeling existentialist romp, like a French sex comedy clipped over on the 80s 'greed-is-good' motto, it has dark undertones that soon get darker and darker, thanks to Ray Liotta's Ray, who is Lulu/Audrey's real husband. At this point we feel like we're suddenly plopped into a pulp fiction piece, with the ex-con bad-ass going to town against the would-be rebel and his girl gone awry. But at the same time, for what Demme and his wonderful screenwriter have, it all works. What helps exponentially (if that's the word) is that Demme doesn't stray either into anything not honest within the boundaries of this situation. It might seem like a risk people wouldn't take in real life, or that the violence is pumped up to, again, pulp fiction territory, but in the logic of the piece- of the tricky deceit and the push-and-pull of the triangle of Charlie/Audrey/Ray- it's just awesomely achieved. Again, the performances are a big asset to the film's suceess. Daniels matches very well that line between playing it innocent and the straight-shooter, the guy we're supposed to identify with as stuck middle-class citizens with families and green lawns, and as a rebel who just has to let some free will into his system now and again. Griffith is in one of her very best, not acting too precocious or annoying, and conveying in the little bits of 'regular' Audrey (i.e. the scene at her mother's) that there's more than meets the eye. And Liotta is so great that it's probably no wonder that he (maybe unfortunately) got typecast as a psycho. There's actually complexity that Liotta gets to, and in a way doesn't make Ray totally unlikeable; he is the villain, of course, but there's a charm that is like the ID unraveled completely as a guy who shoots guns, robs stores, and hits on girls whenever he can. All three make up such a terrific combo here. It's crazy, it's awkward, it's a rip-roaring time, and it's even got heart too. For those who are tired of spoon-fed tripe by the studios, it's an excellent escape into one of the most unconventional (but most pleasantly genre-tastic) of the past 25 years