Something Wild
Jonathan Demme (1986)
In the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, the comfortably circumscribed life of a young man (Cary Grant) is transformed by the unexpected arrival in it of a free-spirited young woman (Katharine Hepburn). The same thing appears to happen in Something Wild but appearances are repeatedly deceptive in this ingenious riff on the screwball tradition. Jonathan Demme, working with a screenplay by E Max Frye, describes the danger as well as the comedy of breaking out of limiting routine, of letting yourself go. At his best – and this film is one of his best – Demme showed an unusual, insatiable interest in people and places. He reliably humanised his characters without sentimentalising them. With the help of his regular cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, he found interesting things to see in what should have been unremarkable locale. These qualities are abundantly in evidence in Something Wild, right from its memorable title sequence and first scene.
The opening credits appear against views of Demme’s native New York. The camera pans across the waterfront, its journey intercut with shots of highways, office buildings, scrap heaps. The images convey a sense of gradually quickening motion – the movement of the water and the craft on it, road traffic, a few joggers. The shape and colouring of the letters of the credits are easily eccentric. The visuals are accompanied by a song, ‘Loco de Amor’, written by David Byrne and performed by him and Celia Cruz, that combines humour, mystery and momentum – in all three respects, it’s foretaste of the film ahead. The camera comes to rest on a café and moves inside. A well-dressed man of about thirty finishes his lunch and asks for the bill. At a nearby table, a woman – dark brunette, dressed in black, also thirtyish – looks up at the man from a book with Frida Kahlo’s face on the cover. The café is busy. The man sizes things up, pockets his bill and exits. He’s taken only a few steps down the street when he hears a voice calling him. The woman in black loudly informs him that he left without paying.
The man (Jeff Daniels) tries feebly to talk his way out of the situation. His accuser (Melanie Griffith) is having none of it – she threatens to call a cop, the man begs her not to. She looks at him levelly and offers a diagnosis: ‘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’. The man assumed the woman worked in the café but she now offers him a lift back to his place of work. She walks to a Pontiac and he follows, incredulous at what he’s doing but magnetised. The woman introduces herself as Lulu. (She wears her hair in the style of perhaps the best known of all screen Lulus – the one played by Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box.) The man is Charles Driggs, recently promoted to vice-president of a Wall Street tax consultancy. As they drive along, Lulu grabs Charles’s pager and, to his consternation, chucks it out of the car. He wears a wedding ring and she says he looks the sort of guy who carries a picture of his family everywhere he goes. Guilty as charged, he produces a photo of a wife and two children. Lulu takes her passenger not back to work but into unknown territory. She starts calling him Charlie. He’ll never be Charles again.
He has to be taken for a ride in order for the plot to go anywhere but Charlie’s capitulation to Lulu also rings psychologically true, even at this early stage. She hooks him from the moment she pronounces him a closet rebel: the look he gives her in response to that says that he knows she’s right and that he’s intrigued by her perceptiveness. He’s physically attracted to her too, though it’s puzzling for a while that this well-off family man doesn’t struggle harder to extricate himself from Lulu. An explanation arrives about halfway through the film. Charlie turns out to be the sort of guy who always carries a photo of his wife and children without mentioning that his wife left him for a dentist and that he’s now living alone. This is a surprise to Lulu, even though by this stage she’s changed her identity more extensively. As Lulu, she crashes and abandons the Pontiac, acquires another one, steals from a liquor store, handcuffs Charlie in a motel room as a prelude to sex, and leads a second escape from an eatery without paying. When they arrive in a town in Pennsylvania, she takes Charlie to a thrift store for them to get new outfits then drives out to the suburbs. As she rings a doorbell there, Lulu instructs Charlie to ‘call me Audrey’, the name used by the woman who opens the front door. This is Peaches (Dana Preu), Audrey’s mother, to whom her daughter introduces Charlie as her new husband. Audrey goes to the bathroom and returns with her dark bob replaced by short blonde hair. After Peaches has played the spinet and made dinner for them, Charlie escorts Audrey, a demure reincarnation of the girl he met in New York, to her ‘Spirit of ‘76’ high school reunion.
Something Wild’s rhythm alters subtly then sharply during this episode. The various stages of the ‘Spirit of ‘76’ evening include for Charlie a horrifying surprise meeting with a Wall Street subordinate, Larry Dillman (Jack Gilpin), and his wife Peggy (Su Tissue), both former classmates of Audrey. In spite of this, a quieter intimacy between Charlie and Audrey is developing when a more horrifying surprise for her shatters it – the appearance on the dance floor of Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta), her actual, estranged husband, fresh out of prison. Audrey’s mood darkens instantly. Ray wants to be sociable but the menace behind his grin comes through loud and clear – though not loud and clear enough to Charlie, who’s impressed by Ray’s flash car and sheepishly admits to driving a Ford station wagon. Once Ray has jettisoned his girlfriend Irene (Margaret Colin), it’s not long before he’s meting out violence to Charlie and Audrey. He reclaims his wife by virtually kidnapping here. The comic moments don’t dry up but it’s Jonathan Demme’s refusal to dismiss any character out of hand that creates texture enough to accommodate the startling shift in tone. Without soft-pedalling his vicious side, Demme and Ray Liotta get across Ray’s neediness and macho vitality, what might have drawn Audrey to him in the first place.
Demme’s balancing act is on the verge of breakdown in the climax to the main trio’s encounters. Charlie rescues Audrey from Ray and takes her back to his home on Long Island; Ray finds out Charlie’s address and forces his way in; in self-defence, Charlie stabs him to death. It’s right that Ray’s intrusion is scary but the ensuing violence and, especially, the ‘suspenseful’ clinch between the two men, before it’s revealed which one has got the knife in his stomach, are prolonged. The last part of the film is curious. Charlie and Audrey are separated when she’s taken away for police questioning and he in an ambulance for a hospital check-up. Charlie gives up his Wall Street job and goes looking for Audrey but she’s moved from her rented room in New York. (I wasn’t sure when Charlie found out she had this room but let that pass.) He wanders back to the café where they first met, has his lunch, pays the bill, is accosted in the street outside by another woman who accuses him of failing to do so. He protests and Audrey, in a third incarnation, appears holding the five-dollar bill that Charlie used to pay but which she swiped before it got into the right hands. She offers Charlie a ride in her new vehicle – a station wagon – and he accepts. Given how grim things have got, the finale seems tacked on – a nod to the genre requirement of a happy ending. Yet that ending also feels earned, so tenaciously has Demme held in tension the light-hearted and darker sides of the story.
The ending also works – as do the nearly two hours preceding it – because of the charm of the two leads. As she went on to prove two years later in Working Girl, Melanie Griffith is a deft, greatly likeable comedienne with the ability to move seamlessly between a character’s exuberance and anxieties. Her comic timing seems effortless – her line readings are distinctive but they always sound natural. Charlie goes through the serial humiliations that are the lot of the screwball straight man: Jeff Daniels is brilliantly resourceful and entirely persuasive in the role. However embarrassed Charlie is, you always get a sense that part of him is enjoying his journey through terra incognita. Demme’s direction helps too, of course: there’s a lovely detail, after Lulu and Charlie have fled from the Italian restaurant without settling up and the irate chef (Charles Napier) vainly pursues their car, of Charlie lying across the back seats, his trousers flapping in the wind, as if in celebration of breaking the law. At the same time, Daniels expresses very well the hero’s increasing exhaustion, his eventual loss of defences – and disguises. E Max Frye has written plenty of excellent dialogue for all concerned but the following exchange between Audrey and Charlie is an especially telling one:
Audrey: What you gonna do now you’ve seen how the other half lives?
Charlie: The other half?
Audrey: The other half of you.
In a strong supporting cast, Dana Preu is outstanding as Audrey’s infinitely hospitable mother. The benign yet rueful Peaches doesn’t argue with anything her daughter says but, as Charlie helps her with the washing up, calmly assures him she knows he isn’t really Audrey’s husband. Jonathan Demme’s unlimited humanity ensures that the entirely positive characterisation of African-American personnel, in minor roles, doesn’t come over as patronising, as it probably would with a misanthropic director (as it recently did in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Besides, Demme’s extensive use of black music and singers on the soundtrack effectively substantiates these characters. Something Wild is a film of its economic time – not just in the person of its Wall Street protagonist but in shots of down-with-speculators graffiti and, late on, a complaint from the girl who moved into Audrey’s apartment that she thinks the landlord is screwing her in what’s meant to be a rent-stabilised tenancy. That these things register not as a crude political message but as pieces of a coherent, perceptive social context is typical of the late, lamented Jonathan Demme.
9 May 2018