From the moment Lula spots three-piece-suit Charlie skipping out on his bill at a New York diner, she has him pegged: “You’re a closet rebel.” From here on out, “Something Wild” avoids pause for any such succinct explanations of character or action, moving with its own free-wheeling logic from one unexpected turn to another.
“Something Wild,” released in 1986, is the kind of movie that seems predictable at first: Crazy urban party girl (Melanie Griffith) shows tightly wound yuppie (Jeff Daniels) how to cut loose. And indeed she does. But the road there is far more intriguing than you can imagine — and the levels on which the movie works are far more rich. Ultimately, however, the charm of the movie rests in director Jonathan Demme’s unfailing instincts.
After the incident at the diner, Lula and Charlie embark on a road trip from the Big Apple to Lula’s hometown in Pennsylvania. We see that Charlie does have a wild side. But Lula proves to be just as split. There’s a “girl next door” beneath the jet black wig and gaudy jewelry. And just as Lula is there to handcuff Charlie to the bed for a night of crazy drunken sex, Charlie is there the next morning with Pepto-Bismol for her hangover. They are two welcome halves of the same coin. But that’s obvious. The character revelations that follow make their need for each other even more complex and less trite. These are not characters with clearly defined goals. They are content to drift along in their own unchanging universes — more concerned with how others view them than with their own desires — unaware of their desperate need for change.
By the time the two get to Lula’s high school reunion, where Charlie poses as her husband, we have no clue where the action will take us next. Any desire to guess the outcome is replaced by a willingness to enjoy the ride.
And just when the movie seems ready to settle into a cliché road comedy, Lula’s ex-husband, Ray (Ray Liotta) shows up to spin the movie off in a deeper and darker direction.
“Something Wild” is Demme’s vision of America as a perverse but welcome mixture of cultures. From the obvious differences between Lula and Charlie to the dullness of the status seekers at the reunion to Ray’s unchanging adolescent aggression, the movie gives us an odd cocktail of everything wonderful and obnoxious about the United States.
Demme has always had a knack for shaping characters of genuine truth. It’s the reason “Silence of the Lambs” was so terrifying and “Melvin and Howard” was so touching. He is great with actors, and from “Something Wild,” one gets the sense that the characters on screen are far more than what existed on the pages of E. Max Frye’s script.
The movie proves the director is at his best when he’s having fun. He has since drifted from that style into more dramatic fare like “Philadelphia” and “Beloved.” His recent “The Truth About Charlie” was a return to instinctive cinema but with less entertaining results.
“Something Wild” is definitely a child of the 1980s. The inherent tackiness is distracting at times but ultimately serves Demme’s view of America during this period. Few movies of such day-glo clutter get richer with repeated viewing. “Something Wild” does.