Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 13-July-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Something Wild (1986)

When stars of the '80s are finally relegated to nostalgia, Something Wild should sit atop the list of career highlights for Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, and Ray Liotta. This is an excellent film: funny, disturbing, and startlingly truthful (and a high point for director Jonathan Demme as well). It takes place over a couple of days during which Daniels' white collar drudge, Charles, gets practically kidnapped by an uninhibited woman who spots him in a New York diner. She is attracted by his nice-guy demeanor with an unruly streak underneath, so she offers him a ride back to his office and takes him to Pennsylvania instead. Charles both does and doesn't want to go, both fears and welcomes her sexual conquest of him and the threat she poses to his ordered life. "I channeled my rebellion into the mainstream," he offers as a plea for and excuse from her attentions. He is too young for a mid-life crisis, but he sure looks desperate for an overhaul.

Along with vibrant characters who interact in fascinating ways, Something Wild is distinguished by meshing normally discordant threads of human comedy and unnerving violence. In this respect it resembles To Die For, although in Something Wild the demarcation between the two elements is more pronounced. Trading her original moniker of Lulu for her given name of Audrey, the siren brings Charlie home to meet her mother, introducing him as her husband. While her mother does not buy the ruse, she can see that the couple is genuinely sweet on each other, their opposite attitudes providing balance and fulfillment of mutual needs. The game is so much fun that they carry it forward to Audrey's high school reunion, where their vacation from (or striving towards?) reality abruptly comes to an end.

Liotta's dangerous charisma has never been more potent than here as Audrey's ex, newly sprung from prison and bent on getting her back. He is one of those people whose evil lurks just beneath the surface, perceptible but not readable. At first he disarms Charlie with the easy masculine camaraderie that enchants all men who cannot generate it themselves; then he strips him of any sense of control and sends him packing in a bloodied mess, leaving Audrey behind. This is the real turning point in Charlie's life, not his coerced departure from New York but the need to decide whether the new self he has started to find is one that stands up or backs down.

It seems right to reveal that Something Wild has a happy outcome, that despite some dark moments each character advances to an end befitting his or her nature. Which is another of its surprising strengths: how believable the connection between Charles and Audrey turns out to be. For richness and astuteness, their wild ride together is something special.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.