Something Wild (1986)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) Much of Something Wild feels like a film on autopilot, as long as you account for one mid-movie swerve into slightly different territory. It doesn’t take a long time for the premise to be established: here’s a straight-arrow corporate guy who gets snagged in the schemes of a flighty bohemian-type girl and—somehow—goes along with her on a road trip away from Manhattan back to her small town. Stuff happens, lessons are learned, characters revealed, cars crashed and chuckles obtained but that only takes us to the middle of the movie, as the last half gets significantly darker as the female lead’s dangerous ex-boyfriend shows up to make trouble for everyone. Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith are the lead couple, while Ray Liotta makes an early bid at his tough-guy screen persona with his role as the ex-boyfriend. The casting seems appropriate; Griffith, in particular, gets to play a few roles all by herself and her chameleonic character. Still, much of the fun of Something Wild is in seeing what else it has in store for the pair’s difficult trip and how they will deal with the unbelievable coincidences that keep complicating their lives. I’m not sure about the darker shift in tone toward the end, but it does feel as if it lives up to its “anything can happen” credo. Not a bad choice for fans of the lead actors or director Jonathan Demme, but there have been quite a few similar movies since then.