Ask yourself, what was the last romantic comedy you saw in a theater?
Once a guaranteed box office draw, rom coms have all but disappeared from American cinemas. In Hollywood’s unending pursuit of the dollar, studios have eliminated the mid-budget adult movie. In an interview during the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, director James Gray commented on this, “I think the movie business made a critical mistake…to think of it as this film did not make a ton of money thus we don't make that film. This film will make a ton of money thus we make that one. A very strict balance sheet equation.”
In doing so, entire genres have been decommissioned from the theatrical experience. Short of going extinct, rom coms have limped to the streaming services – where they’ve barely clung to survival. Some have flaunted this as a quiet victory in the face of the blockbuster homogenization of the box office. But when most streaming rom coms look like they were drably filmed over a week that both b-list stars had free (i.e. look like shit), it’s hard to believe that survival was even worth it.
Something Wild (1986), Jonathan Demme’s wacky road-trip romance offers a glimpse into the heights we used to be able to reach. Starring Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, and Ray Liotta in his first leading role, Something Wild is exactly that. Eclectic in its music, eccentric in its look, and surprising in its twists – the movie feels like a distillation of Demme’s entire filmography.
From concert docs like Stop Making Sense (1984) to modern masterpieces of suspense like Silence of the Lambs (1991), Demme’s career spanned a staggering amount of genres, which makes his mastery of tone so impressive.
Charlie (Daniels) is a boyish Wall Street yuppie who’s highest idea of rebellion is skipping out on the check at a restaurant. However, he’s caught in the act by Lulu (Griffith), a wildly dressed carefree degenerate, who kidnaps him for a weekend trip to New Jersey. The opening minutes of Something Wild are a crash course in how to kickstart your movie. Lulu kidnaps Charlie, throws away his phone, pounds back a fifth of scotch, robs a liquor store, and makes out with him. It’s a crescendo that immediately heightens the stakes to the comically absurd. This absurdity is only exacerbated by the look and feel of the movie – which can only be described as from the set of Pee-wee's Playhouse.
This world is one of power-clashing, where crazy styles and clashing patterns somehow work harmoniously together. In an interview with the Criterion Collection, Demme stated that he wanted the world to feel like a hot-house, using bright colors to mirror Lulu’s wild personality. Lulu feels like the entire costume budget – jet black nails and hair, gaudy Egyptian jewelry, and accessories that range from pink shag steering wheels to plastic blue sunglasses. Lulu’s character could be minimized to that of a manic pixie dream girl, but Griffith breaks that shackle with enough chaotic energy to burn the celluloid she was filmed on. With an exterior that screams and shouts, Griffith’s voice is surprisingly soft and her words are precise – as if she was speaking to a baby. Which in Charlie’s case is correct.
For how wild Lulu is, Charlie is a boy in a man’s body. He may protest Lulu’s criminal acts, but the moment he realizes he gets to kiss the pretty girl, he’s on board. When the two have sex early on, Lulu is in black lingerie with a large medallion of Africa around her neck. Charlie is in tighty-whities, a t-shirt, and is quite literally tucked into the covers – slackjawed like his character from Dumb and Dumber – as Lulu grinds atop him. With floppy blonde hair and a rubber face to rival Jim Carrey, it’s refreshing to see Daniels in such big comedic form – far from the somber elder statesman he’s evolved into in the last decade.
This man-child schtick can only be sympathetic to an audience for so long, as he fluctuates between the put-upon victim to the stick-in-the-mud scold. And even though we hope that the pair will end up with each other, Charlie is still cheating on his unseen wife back in NYC. To solve this, Demme keeps Charlie likable by emphasizing his kindness on the road. Demme said, “I wound up putting an emphasis on how effortlessly Charlie interacts with people of all ages, all races, all genders. How nice he is.” Similar to Demme’s other Schlub Cinema inductee Rachel Getting Married (2008), the film is so diverse in both its casting and its music as the pair drive further south. Lulu almost exclusively listens to feel-good reggae along the road trip and Demme scores the first half of the film with upbeat indie rock from the likes of The Talking Heads and The Feelies.
And fifty minutes into the film, that all goes away. Enter Ray Liotta as Ray. Lulu’s ex.
Racist, violent, at the end of his rope – Ray is everything that Charlie isn’t. I’ve never seen a movie’s tone change so drastically with the introduction of a single character. The once-vibrant color palette dims to a sickening fluorescent blue, and the globe-spanning soundtrack retracts to singular, grinding guitar riffs. There’s a reason why fans held Something Wild in the same pantheon as Goodfellas after Liotta’s tragic death in May. Liotta’s performance as Ray would be impressive for a veteran of the screen, but it’s astounding that this was his first lead role. To reveal his role in the story would be to ruin one of the best left turns in film history, but Ray embodies the dread and danger that can often accompany the thrill of surprise.
A few weeks ago my partner and I watched I Want You Back (2022), a perfectly okay Hulu rom com starring Charlie Day and Jenny Slate. With the bar resting deep beneath the earth, things like boring drone footage of the Atlanta skyline seemed fine, and the static shots of Pete Davidson improvising for a few minutes seemed like a cross we simply had to bear. But watching Something Wild is a reminder that we should never settle for boring. In the same Criterion interview, Demme said that once they saw Griffith in her gonzo attire, that kinetic energy guided the rest of the filming process. So please – let our movies look like Pee-wee's Playhouse again.
Something Wild is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.