REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
May 1, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

SOMETHING WILD | JONATHAN DEMME | 1986

My memories of seeing Something Wild on its release center on the assured filmmaking, excellent performances from the three leads, and an adroit mix of production design and cinematography hitting the sweet spot between NYC-in-the-’80s hipness and kitsch. This sense is echoed still in descriptions of the film — Amazon Prime labels it “feel good” and “a wonderfully zesty romantic thriller,” while other critics refer to the journey of Jeff Daniels’ banker as Hitchcockian. All of this is fair enough, but was not my reaction at watching it again, 38 years after release.

Something Wild begins as an edgily cheerful caper film, where an ostensibly free-spirited woman lures an ostensibly buttoned-down family-man banker on a road trip, first to low-stakes crime and sex in a sleazy New Jersey hotel, then to Pennsylvania for her high school reunion. From there the story detours abruptly, as the woman’s ex-con ex-husband arrives to violently reclaim her. The banker concocts a scheme to free her, the ex-husband tracks them to suburban Connecticut, harrowing violence ensues. There is an ostensibly happy ending.

The movie is utterly bifurcated. One track is about the delirious pleasures of filmmaking. Every detail of production radiates delight (or, less charitably, self-satisfaction, as these gestures of taste occasionally cut against the reality of a given moment): the lovingly discovered and decorated locations, the tchotchkes, the costumes, the in-your-face-cool soundtrack, the wise-ass casting of character actors and pals in just about every small role. Charles Napier! John Sayles! Tracey Walter! John Waters! Steve Scales! Demme’s mom! And they’re all great — the acting across the board is excellent, and the three leads, Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, and Ray Liotta, are superb.

But another track shadows this sense of pleasure, a sour undercurrent that doesn’t feel integrated. Both Griffiths and Daniels’ characters conceal their true circumstances from one another, and both are hypocritical when these lies are exposed. The nature of Daniels’ lie — posing as a traditional family man when that family has imploded in divorce — serves to make room for the adventure he finds, and the man Griffiths ostensibly seeks. The exposure of Griffiths lie lands differently — acting like a devil-may-care rule-breaker whose actual goal is to perform socially conventional success to her high-school peers. But what’s unsettling is how the film buys into Griffith’s transformation. When she swaps her Louise Brooks bob, black clothes, and East Village jewelry for a white garden party dress and blonde pixie hair, it’s presented like the old trope of a bookworm taking off her glasses and shaking down her hair to suddenly rival all the cheerleaders. Griffiths sheds the persona we’ve been enjoying, and we — like Daniels — are supposed to love it. More, after this change toward convention, she almost completely loses her agency in the last third of the story, pulled this way and that, sullenly reading a book about Winnie Mandela while the men fight over her, and ultimately being rescued. In the final scene she reappears immaculately dressed — with a white hat! — looking like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina. This is presented as gorgeous, but is more accurately illegible. Who are these people?

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

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