Jonathan Demme had over a decade's worth of exploitation flicks and thrillers, graduating from Roger Corman University in the '70s to the heights of Oscar nominations by the mid-'80s. By the time Something Wild hit his desk he had the luxury of taking his pick. It read like an old screwball comedy but with a harder more contemporary edge. The director who would launch the formalised serial killer genre in a few years with Silence of the Lambs would have seen that right off.
This is why the whacky looking poster art sent out for this movie is such a bait and switch. Melanie Griffith looks wickedly alluring and Jeff Daniels, upsidedown, is worried. But despite the meet cute outside the restaurant and the initial joyride she takes him on, the comedy steadily cranks down and gets replaced by darker matter. That's before the disruption in the middle act.
The '80s saw the emergence of a new kind of American upwardly moving salary jerk or perhaps just a new name for them. The Yuppie was a figure of fun or malevolance, the notion that the future of western culture would be in the hands of greed driven psychos was a terrifying one and, whether it was comedy like Desperately Seeking Susan or thriller like Fatal Attraction, the Yuppie Nightmare movie appeared to assuage our fear with their disintegration or satisfy our powerless envy through ridicule. This bled into the following decade even more extremely and had already been taken far enough by Martin Scorsese with After Hours that the jokes landed so hard they stopped being funny.
If I say that E. Max Frye's screenplay takes a softer approach, it's not to suggest that Something Wild is a lightweight piece but concerned less with attacking the Yuppie than understanding them. Demme ran with that, adding enough to let the gravity takeover feel natural. Demme keeps his eye on character and nurturing performances that give the extraordinary situation credibility.
Melanie Griffith, if she had started today, would have been called a nepo baby because she was Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren's daughter. But that would still be unfair considering she was a child actor and as a teenager played opposite Gene Hackmanin Night Moves, and then in Roar with the lions she grew up with. This role feels like a vindication of her life experience to date. After the whacky update of a Rosalind Russell or Katherine Hepburn screwball agent of chaos has worn out and the wig comes off in her mother's house, she's Audrey with a real life story that involves pain. Griffith assumes the dignity smoothly, risking the audience's resentment at the loss of the sexy flake, and gets away with it. This is her film.
Jeff Daniels as Charlie has a tougher job winning us over from his ginger token rebellion. He's exactly the starched effigy the audience has been warned against, using everyone else's money to make his fortune regardless of everyone else. He is given his own pain and it's fed to us piecemeal but his playing of the turning point is exceptional, winding up the spring that shoots him into his new life he ums and ers and appeals to everything his antagonists should superficially assume about him. All of that suit-deep convention is jettisoned as he physcially leaps toward Audrey. He is careful, after that, to retain Charlie's timidity, tiny tics and casting of his gaze that speak of a life of passive aggression. Daniels was a realitive newcomer to the screen and while he might have been initially chosen for his clean-lined all American look he gave depth to prevent the kind of caricature that would have plunged this film into obscurity.
Ray Liotta, lean and hungry, who would soon hold his own beside De Niro and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, provides a prototype performance, adding a growling narcissism to his bad boy role. He is unpredictably dangerous. When Charlie stops a train of conversation about Audrey's sexual performance, retaining the better part of his old conventionality, Ray surprisingly relents but then moves on to further violence, a walking hair trigger.
Something Wild does look like the '80s cinema around it with big bright colour and soft light in the dark and a mix of needledrop and scored music. The credits open with a solo David Byrne track that sounds like Talking Heads, the score credits for John Cale and Laurie Anderson cover both arthouse and mid-'80s cache. Those are ticked boxes but there is one moment I noticed in the most recent watch that struck me. In a brief establishing shot of a street, a convertible glides past with a brace of yuppies in it, the song on the car speakers is New Order's Temptation, a song four years old at the time. While the chaos is transforming Charlie inside, the rest of America is still in the Yuppie dream, driving a vintage convertible, consuming the Noo Wave now that it is safe to do so. Such a pleasant alternative to something like About Last Night's constant screaming mainstream pop.
Jonathan Demme chose to quietly subvert the film he was expected to make by finding the sobering core in the screenplay. He might easily have got away with making the movie of the poster, raked in a good opening weekend and moved on but the question of what lay beneath the designer shirts and investment portfolios of his culture proved too compelling. It was an example that the film culture didn't heed, with the likes of Basic Instinct or The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Then again, it was Demme's Silence of the Lambs, showing he was happy to dress up base exploitation in glossy-budgeted finery and start one of the most detestable, convention-guarding genres in recent cinema history, so he wasn't really above anything. Except there was this moment where he went with his gut, plied his craft and made something durable.
Viewing notes: I watched this free with my Prime subscription in an HD presentation. Also available to rent through YouTube and Apple.
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