Broken Nose Can't Kill You

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The oft-cited tonal shift that occurs roughly halfway through Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, which has a thoroughly sparkling Criterion release set for May 10, is rather strikingly illustrated by the following series of images. While not exactly temporally equidistant from each other, you can nevertheless see how the film begins as a light, off-kilter romantic comedy...

...featuring Jeff Daniels in goofy mode as Charlie Driggs, a white collar type with a secret penchant for petit larceny, and the ever-airy-voiced Melanie Griffith as Lulu (or Audrey, depending on where you are in the film), an aggressively quirked and sexual young woman who pins Charlie on that larceny business and seduces him not only into bed but onto the road, where the two drink and commit various effervescent misdemeanors. It's hard at first to sympathize with Charlie, who we're told is married and has kids, who we have no reason to believe are terrible people. Yet boy he sure fell into bed with Lulu without a moments hesitation or guilt.

At any rate, those misdemeanors are committed with various levels of recklessness, and can't help but draw the attention of folks like the fellow below, played by John Sayles...

...which gives the film a certain amount of suspense, even if you happen to be rooting for the cops, as I kinda sorta was. Demme's film, however, is one of two distinct halves, and once Ray Liotta as Lulu's husband Ray, who's the kind of guy who is serious about the crimes he commits, and makes Charlie and Lulu look like pikers, arrives on the scene, the violent force of his character brings new information to light while simulatenously ratcheting up the suspense, darkening Demme and DP Tak Fujimoto's previously bright 1980s palette, and leading where, one does not know...

Not quite the frivolous, loosening-up-the-square road comedy we started with, Something Wild is loose and exact in its details, which was typical of Demme in this period, and it's as diverse as his filmography. He preceded Something Wild with both Swing Shift, starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and his famous Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984, and followed it first with another, but quite different concert film, Swimming to Cambodia with Spalding Gray, various TV projects, and then back to colorful comedies with 1988's Married to the Mob.

Apart from proving to me that it can pay to stick with movies that annoy you (twice before, I was so put off by what I judged to be the film's solipsism that I turned it off before Liotta even showed up), Something Wild, and all 1980s Demme films really, stands as a bit of a time capsule for a particular kind of American film. The sunniness of the whole thing, in contrast to some of what's taking place on the ground, is part of it, but so is seeing the name "Tak Fujimoto" in the credits (a name I first noticed on Demme's The Silence of the Lambs), and the appearance of people like Charles Napier and, even more to the point, Kenneth Utt. The late Kenneth Utt was Demme's producing partner, and he had cameos in several of the movies he not only directed -- in Something Wild he plays the "Dad" of "Mom & Dad's", a restaurant Charlie and Lulu eat in -- but produced as well, most notably George Armitage's Miami Blues, in which Utt plays a stone-face (well, of course) but apparently grieving Hare Krishna, attended to, in a half-assed sort of a way, by Det. Hoke Mosely, played by Fred Ward, whose partner, Bill Henderson, is played by Charles Napier.

I started noticing Utt everywhere in the 80s, or anyway that's how it felt. He almost never said a word, but you don't forget a face like that. Him, and Napier, and Demme, and Fujimoto, they all seemed to be, and were, joined at the hip, and it was like a little get together every time they all showed up in the credits for the same film. A get together then, a time capsule now.

Underutilized

I seem to have, in my head, a growing list of actors and actresses who I believe have been ill-served by Hollywood. Not only Hollywood, really, but the American film industry as a whole. These are actors who get stuck playing one kind of role, or are stuck playing sidekicks or girlfriends to leads who aren't fit to buy them lunch. Most film lovers probably have a list like this, and when you're young you learn to take these people for granted. You know they'll pop up as the lead cop's partner who, two-thirds of the way into the film, is on his way to buy his handicapped daughter the video-game music-toy she's been asking for, and for which he's been saving, when all of a sudden a slumming John Malkovich shows up and pushes him off a cliff. And you learn not to care. And then you see that same guy who got pushed off a cliff in a movie about a guy who only wants justice, or is dying, or he wants justice before he dies, and he's great, and you think, "Well shit. I had no idea."

At the top of my own list is probably Jeff Daniels, so dead-on-the-money in The Squid and the Whale and The Purple Rose of Cairo (and the only interesting thing about 2 Days in the Valley, a film in which he played the main cop's partner, and a film which at least found an original way to write him out of the action, even while crippling itself in the process). I'd also include Jeff Goldblum and Delroy Lindo. Catherine Keener, as well, even though she does land some pretty decent roles from time to time. But the fact that Hollywood still casts her as the Wife or the Girlfriend just kills me.

Anyway. The point of all this is that recently I rewatched Gus Van Sant's hypnotic take on the Columbine massacre, Elephant. I hadn't seen the film in a long time, but one thing that always stuck with me was, as I used to think of him, That Guy Who Played that One Kid's Dad. You Know, the Drunk Guy. Turns out, it was Timothy Bottoms.

He technically has two scenes, but the second one is right near the end, and consists mainly of him walking on screen and asking his son a question. He nails that scene, mind you, and I'm not being sarcastic, but it's the first scene, where he's drunk at about eight in the morning and driving his son to school, that made me say the first time I saw the film, and again last weekend when I saw the film for a second time, "Well shit. I had no idea."

I didn't know it was Timothy Bottoms. I am not, I admit, that familiar with his body of work. But I knew his name, and watching him in that first scene, seeing how quietly he plays shame and humiliation and guilt as his son (a very good John McFarland) is forced to take control of the situation, I realized that Timothy Bottoms is a freaking damn good actor. He gets all the torment and denial of the character across while also giving one of the most genuine drunk performances I've ever seen. Drunk acting must be one of the toughest things for any actor to do, and I say that as a non-actor who can only assume that's the case because I almost never see an actor playing drunk who doesn't botch it, or at least overdo it to the point where you can see his wheels turning. Bottoms gets it absolutely right. That, and everything else I've mentioned, in just a couple of minutes of screen time.

Check out the film, if you haven't already seen it, because the whole thing is quite good, but at least rent it for Bottoms. He does brilliant work here, and attention should be paid.