May 9, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
At Slant.
…Few directors, however, have tackled social and personal shape-shifting as concretely or as intuitively as Jonathan Demme. Throughout his diverse yet unified oeuvre, characters are uncannily aware of what makes them tick, to the point that exposition is occasionally bypassed altogether. Something Wild, one of his best films, stylizes this strength of personality a step further with people who are addicted to reinvention, both as a means of expression and as a method of exposing absurdity. When Lulu (Melanie Griffith) catches go-getter businessman Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) skipping out on a lunch check in a Manhattan diner, she’s wearing a straight, black wig and faux-voodoo accoutrements around her neck and wrists; before the movie hits the halfway mark, she’s exchanged this for a cozy, floral sundress and cropped, bleach-blond hair. By the time the film ends, she’s dragged Driggs through at least four iterations of herself, and done it all with a sarcastic smile not for the thrill of the moment, but the depth of possibility at her fingertips.
In the third act, we meet Lulu’s ex-boyfriend, paroled criminal Ray (Ray Liotta), who gleefully remembers robbing convenience stores at gunpoint while wearing a ski mask, only to escape with the loot, ditch his headgear, don a coat, and return to the crime scene moments later unnoticed. There’s an unspoken philosophy shared by these two erstwhile lovers: that only fools and suckers distinguish human beings by traits as superficial as appearance and demeanor. And this, too, is a governing law of Demme’s cadence-oriented universe, a mid-’80s new-wave wonderland of pale pinks, purples, and blues where clusters of teenage rappers congregate at the periphery of our dramatic focus.
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