An Unforgettable Ray Liotta Delivers an All-Time Great Performance in Jonathan Demme's Mercurial Masterpiece Something Wild
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
Beyond keeping this website afloat during times of great peril and uncertainty, this column has afforded me a wonderful opportunity to revisit the films of my childhood and adolescence. The only thing I love more than watching and writing about egregiously terrible motion pictures from when I was a kid and the world was simultaneously much more innocent and much more terrible is watching and revisiting movies from when I was a kid that I absolutely adored.
I’m talking movies like Something Wild. I have a complicated relationship with Jonathan Demme’s audacious 1986 cult classic because it made the 2008 list of movies featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls that played a much bigger role in popularizing the phrase than introducing it in the very first My World of Flops entry on Elizabethtown did.
People LOVE lists. That was particularly true in 2008 when the Manic Pixie Dream Girl article rocked the internet. For the first and undoubtedly final time in my career, I had the curious distinction of creating something that became too popular and widespread, to the point that at a certain point I began to feel like I had lost control over the concept completely.
As I wrote in an article for Salon that, now that I think about it, ALSO proved excessively popular and well-read, in that it made my bosses at Pitchfork very angry that the one viral piece I wrote while working for them was for another website, a phrase I had coined to critique sexist tropes and pathetic male fantasies had become a phrase that was used to diminish and attack female characters.
I conceived of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype as inherently pejorative. By definition, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl could not have much in the way of independence of autonomy. She is a figure of male fantasy, without agency or a rich inner life.
That certainly does not describe Lulu/Audrey, the sexy, dangerous, achingly sad and infinitely complex and contradictory woman Melanie Griffith unforgettably plays in Something Wild. Oh sure, when reduced to a broad outline, Audrey sure looks like a quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s a quirky, free-spirited sex bomb who swoops into the humdrum life of a moderately depressed white man with a pair of handcuffs inside her watermelon purse and ignites his long-dormant lust for life during a riotous and rollicking road trip.
Yet there’s nothing at all one dimensional about Audrey. She’s a figure of great depth and sadness and ache, a woman with a past but also with a future. She only appears to be a flighty figure of fantasy. Something Wild is a film of unexpected depth. The same is true of Griffith’s extraordinary, Golden Globe nominated, career-best performance.
Jeff Daniels is equally brilliant and equally complicated and contradictory as Charlie Driggs, the aforementioned moderately depressed white man. Despite being a very successful businessman, Charlie opens the movie with a little act of larceny: he walks out without paying at a cozy little diner, a modest burst of rebellion noticed only by Audrey, a hard-living, hard-drinking grifter in a Louis Brooks wig with a mind for petty crime and a bod for sin.
When Charlie meets Audrey she calls herself Lulu for reasons that eventually become apparent. It’s as Lulu is a character Audrey inhabits because the pain and trauma of her past is too intense to bear.
Audrey recognizes in Charlie a hunger to break free from the crushing conformity of his yuppie existence so instead of taking him back to his office she takes him to a liquor store where she liberates some currency from the register without the clerk knowing and takes Charlie to a cheap hotel and fucks his brains out.
Charlie’s staid life sambas to of an intoxicating Latin rhythm once he trades in lucrative but soul-crushing corporate labor for a wild life of sex, whiskey and the freedom and adventure of the American open road.
Audrey takes her besotted new lover on a road trip to her home town, where she introduces him to her mother as her eminently respectable husband and takes him to her 10 year high school reunion.
It is at the reunion that Audrey unhappily reconnects with a figure of infinite darkness whose presence will change the film in profound and dramatic ways.
Ray Sinclair, the psychotic ex-convict Ray Liotta plays in a star-making, Golden Globe-nominated performance, should be way too dark and disturbing a character for a whimsical, joyful romantic comedy.
Hell, even in a famously brutal, nearly X-rated bloodbath like Goodfellas Ray would stand out for being particularly vicious and unhinged. But something tricky and unexpected happens once Liotta enters the scene with a homicidal gleam in those bedroom blue eyes: Something Wild changes genres and tones almost instantly.
A sexy road movie about a bored man who gets more than he bargained for when he takes a walk on the wild side makes a whiplash turn into grim psychodrama when Ray sidles up to his ex-wife’s straight-laced new beau with nothing but malice and murder in his evil, poisoned mind and begins fucking with him relentlessly.
E. Max Frye was still in college when he wrote Something Wild. He had the neophyte’s courage. If Frye were more experienced he might have had it drilled into him that films do not change genres and tones halfway through, that you cannot transform a charming and sexy romantic comedy into a brutal crime drama that climaxes with a previously milquetoast protagonist stabbing the terrifying bad guy in the chest without completely losing the audience in the process.
In an absolutely mesmerizing performance, Liotta plays Ray as someone who relishes every moment out of prison because he knows damn well that a monster like himself belongs behind bars until his dying day.
With her unapologetic sexuality and quirky, rule-breaking ways, Audrey seems dangerous to Charlie. Ray legitimately is dangerous. The look of all-consuming fear and mortification in Audrey’s eyes the first time she sees Ray at the reunion conveys wordlessly but powerfully conveys the scary depths of Ray’s evil.
Ray commits crimes for the money, of course but also because he loves to see the fear and desperation in the eyes of his victims. He takes great, malicious joy in being evil, in taking what he wants, when he wants, eternally daring the universe to stop him.
Ray is sleek and scary and disconcertingly sexy and takes Audrey hostage after dragging Charlie into what is clearly only the latest in an endless series of hold-ups. When the unlikely, unhappy trio checks into the kind of motels whose walls are so cheap a lunatic like Ray can, and does, kick through them in a fit of rage, the film’s style goes from spirited and free to dystopian and post-apocalyptic.
Like Audrey, Charlie is full of surprises. As Audrey immediately discerns, behind the buttoned-up facade Charlie is stronger and darker and more rebellious than he appears. When Ray absconds with Audrey, Charlie sets about winning her back, knowing damn well he could be signing his own death certificate in the process.
Something Wild is one of those minor miracles that does everything right, down to the inspired casting of folks like John Waters, John Sayles and Charles Napier in the bit roles of a used car salesman, cop and irate chef respectively.
Casting Napier as a chef who runs after Audrey and Charlie when they run out on a bill is brilliant because of all the glorious history Napier brings to the role as one of the top tough guy character actors of his time, but also because he legitimately seems like a man capable of beating someone to death with his fists for not paying for a sandwich.
In a directorial tour de force, Jonathan Demme maintains complete control over the film’s fascinating and extreme tonal shifts.
I loved, loved, loved Something Wild. I particularly responded to its vision of our country as a glorious melting pot that gets its energy and its soul and its flavor from the immigrants that flock to its shores in search of freedom, opportunity and a change at the good, wild life.
In the end, Lulu is just too goddamn brilliant and singular and inspired a character to qualify as a hoary trope like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Something Wild, to its credit, is populated by three-dimensional characters with spirit and soul and substance, even if it’s easy to see how they could pass as well-worn archetypes I am synonymous with, weirdly enough.
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