Part 2 of my Jonathan Demme double feature. Something Wild is a film whose description can be perfectly described by its title alone. The story follows Charles (Jeff Daniels), a respectable new VP of a corporation who meets a wild and manipulative drifter first known as Lulu (Melanie Griffith) who confronts him on a street for walking out of a restaurant without paying his check. She senses a wild, rebellious side of him, and she’s not wrong. She offers to drive him around for a bit and give him a ride back to work, and he reluctantly agrees. She doesn’t drive him to work and instead leaves town and leads him into the craziest weekend of his life. Charlie at first seems so unsure of himself and just goes along for the ride, but we see that he’s secretly enjoying every detail of the rebellion of blowing off work to spend the weekend with some exciting girl he just met. But from there, things get a little more complicated as a vulnerability is exposed in both characters. We at first mistake Lulu for just a wild, surface-level character, but in a particularly telling scene she takes Charles to meet her mother, pretending they are married. It shows a vulnerability and sadness to her character, especially when her mom, who plays along with her daughter’s fantasies but knows the truth says to Charles, “You look out for that girl.” And from there, the lies begin to become truths, facades fail, and both Charles and Lulu find a sort of volatile vulnerability with each other that perhaps neither has felt before.
Ray Liotta also shows up in the latter half of the film, as Lulu’s ex-husband. From here, the film seems to shift gears and further add to the mayhem and craziness of the plot. It’s a crazy, ludicrous plot that is as entertaining as it is unlikely, but that never detracts from the fun of it. At the core, the film is about being truly known by someone, and perhaps for that to really happen, it just takes something wild.