Something Wild (1986) Probably every young struggling actor dreams to getting the equivalent of Ray Liotta's breakthrough, take-no-prisoners role in this movie.....
.......to suddenly appear in the second half of what starts out as a cute quirky romantic comedy and then literally seize the movie by its throat, shove it into a blender, and by sheer force of performance turn the movie into something nobody saw coming.
In essence, hijacking the film and driving it 90 miles a hour in a completely different direction, rendering the storyline schizophrenic to the max.
Though made in 1986, "Something Wild" looked more like something that came out of the 1970's....... when the clueless movie studios would willingly greenlight oddball projects in their desperate attempts to figure out anything that might appeal to an audience they'd lost touch with.
In this day and age of bloated franchises, the chances of anyone ever again making a movie like this again fall somewhere between zero and you-gotta-be-shittin'-me.
Credit director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye with taking a shopworn genre, standing it on its head and turning it inside out and backwards.
The genre we speak of goes back as far as the 1938 Howard Hawk screwball classic "Bringing Up Baby".....
You know the drill. An introverted stuffed shirt encounters a bubbly, devil-may-care Manic Pixie Dreamgirl who proceeds to turn his well ordered life into constant chaos in a series of madcap misadventures. Laughs ensue.
In 'Something Wild', it's a button downed yuppie (Jeff Daniels) who's taken on the thrill ride of his life by a blowsy, hot-to-trot babe (Melanie Griffith) who especially loves dine-and-dash scams perpetrated on restaurants and coffee shops.
So adorable. So cute. So fluffy.
That is until Manic Pixie's violent, borderline psychotic ex-convict, ex-husband shows up.....played by young Ray Liotta.
Not only does Liotta take control of the movie and the remainder of its storyline (a hairpin turn from romcom to thriller), he creates his very own signature role that he'd return to over and over again.......the tightly wound but still genial madman, wearing a thin veneer of affability that barely conceals his penchant for explosive rage. Only his maniacal laugh gives him away.....that sudden eruption of contagious guffaws likely to happen at any inappropriate moment.
Ladies and gentlemen.......that's how a star was born. And so well sustained through the ensuing decades.
And regardless of whether he repeated his now patented Mr. Crazy role or took on all new more wide ranging acting challenges, we couldn't take our eyes off him.
That's why his passing, at only age 67 came as such a blow to both audiences and the cinema community. Because all of us felt he was the kind of actor who promised that still greater work lay ahead of him.
R.I.P. Ray Liotta......you took us by storm with your very first film role, turning "Something Wild" into a 4 star (****) experience......and more than proved that as striking as that performance was, the best was yet to come.
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