TRUE STORIES - #951

Somewhere on the road between the early ’80s debut of MTV and the post sex, lies, and videotape Sundance revolution of early ’90s cinema, there is a pit stop: David Byrne’s  True Stories. More than just a vehicle for the Talking Heads’ next album--though there are some clips that were repurposed into genuine music videos--but not as fully realized a narrative as other artists’ self-mythologizing star turns (Prince’s Purple Rain or A Hard Day’s Night [review] and Spice World), True Stories is a genuine oddity. All these years later, revived by the Criterion Collection, released to a new audience, it comes off as a curio from another time, strangely innocent and yet indicative of the decade’s sometimes arch and ironic approach to commercial art.

The story goes that David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines, and he wanted to both explore the Americana that often fueled these bizarre tales but also celebrate the Americans that devoured them. True Stories is set in the fictional hamlet of Virgil, deep in the heart of Texas, and with Byrne serving as an observant on-camera narrator, the movie tracks the town’s populace over several days leading up to a celebratory parade and talent show. “Altman-esque” could easily be applied to True Stories; with its large criss-crossing cast and focus on at least one character’s attempt to write a song, it could be viewed as a kind of mini Nashville. I’d wager Byrne took more from his buddies Jonathan Demme and Jim Jarmusch, however; True Stories has the same quirkiness the latter would apply to his movies Mystery Train [review] and Coffee & Cigarettes.

Sadly, I fear I am spending more time talking about what the movie is like because that is really more interesting than what it is. There isn’t a lot to hang your hat on here, even with all the intersecting stories and the collection of wonderful character actors. Spalding Gray shows up as a tech baron who is disconnected from his family and neighbors; Swoosie Kurtz is a rich woman who never leaves her bed; and Jo Harvey Allen (The Homesman) regularly gets some chuckles as the living embodiment of a tabloid, a compulsive liar who connects herself to Elvis Presley, JFK, and just about anything else she can think of. (One of Byrne’s co-writers, Stephen Toblowsky, is also a well-known character actor, having appeared in Spaceballs, Groundhog Day, and countless others.) True Stories checks in on factory workers, bar patrons, and even the children of Virgil, and while one might be worried that an arty New Yorker like Byrne would not be able to resist making fun of Middle America, nothing could be further from the truth. His vision of Texas can certainly be unique to him--the music, the fashion, etc.--but he appears to have genuine affection for the small-town values that keep this community a community. He even dresses in western wear to (awkwardly) fit in.

That said, it’s clear that Byrne wants to make fun of something, but the satire is so scattered, it’s hard to tell what that is. Targets include advertising, religion, dating, popular music--all things that didn’t require the Texas setting to get skewered. Or is it that the individual dreams of the Virgil citizenry will carry on despite the invasion of outside ideas? Given that the climactic song is all about how love is more important than material goods or even freedom, such a theory would not be a stretch. It’s even called “People Like Us,” an inclusive statement, and sung in the movie by John Goodman, the saving grace of True Stories.

Only a few years into his career at the age of 34, True Stories was a pretty substantial role for Goodman. The Big Easy and Raising Arizona would soon follow, and John Goodman would become the John Goodman we all know and love, but the part of Louis Fyne shows the performer as an almost naïve neophyte. Louis works at the microchip manufacturer just like everyone else, and at night he turns his attention to finding love. Goodman plays him as both self-assured and meek, one trait masking the other, and there is a sweetness to the performance that makes it impossible to not want Louis to find what he’s looking for (or maybe for the actor to appear in a revival of Marty). Though more fresh-faced than he’d even appear in his first collaboration with the Coens, all the classic Goodman traits are there: the smile that is both endearing and tricksterish, the expert comedic timing and physical precision, the natural line delivery. His presence on the screen is so amiable, it imbues the rest of True Stories with a similar likeability, meaning that even if David Byrne’s threads never weave into a single tapestry, it’s hard not to still feel good about having spent your time taking a tour through his made-up utopia of would-be normalcy.

SOMETHING WILD (1961) - #850

Jack Garfein is a name more people need to know. A survivor of the Holocaust, Garfein immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia, joining the famed Actors Studio and training as a theater director, working alongside Elia Kazan and with actors as storied as James Dean, Marlon Brando, and eventually Ben Gazzara, who starred in Garfein’s first movie, the disquieting, insightful The Strange One [review]. These details and much more are revealed in the fascinating interview with film critic Kim Morgan on Criterion’s new release of Garfein’s second--and last--motion picture, 1961’s uniquely powerful Something Wild.

Something Wild is a challenging movie, both by today’s standards and certainly by the standards of the early 1960s. Following a typically stupendous Saul Bass title sequence, the movie--scripted by Garfein and Alex Karmel, based on Karmel’s novel--introduces Mary Ann (Carroll Baker, star of Baby Doll and Garfein’s then-wife), a New York college student on her way home. When passing through the park, she is attacked and raped. Upon returning to the house where she lives with her mother and stepfather, Mary Ann finds she can’t really return to normal life, and so she breaks from it, leaving school and family. Garfein presents a single poignant image: a pile of textbooks left on a bench, and Mary Ann walking away. She gets an apartment and a sales clerk job and tries for a new life.

What’s interesting about following Mary Ann is how everything about her journey is on the exterior. The girl never expresses herself, we can only intuit how she feels from behavior. Following the physical assault, she reacts to everything physical, every encounter, in her world. A crowded subway train triggers her memory, and she can’t remain confined. Every man she meets is a potential threat; every woman seems to want to pimp her out. Baker says little throughout the movie--in fact, much of the first half hour is completely dialogue-free--but she doesn’t really have to. The actress finds a fragile balance. Mary Ann is numb, and yet she still feels. In her effort to not project what is going on inside her, Baker ends up showing the audience everything. The performer is simultaneously withholding and naked.

Even if this were all there was to Something Wild (which it should be said bears no relation to the Jonathan Demme film of the same name [review]), that would be enough. It would still be a moving portrait of a woman dealing with trauma. That Garfein builds in a mid-film twist, however, means there is also much more to unpack. After the women at her work haze her, Mary Ann decides that it’s all too much and tries to commit suicide. A passerby stops her before she can jump off the bridge. The seeming Good Samaritan, Mike (Ralph Meeker, Kiss Me Deadly [review]), takes the distraught woman home, and lets her sleep it off. Only, as Mary Ann comes back to herself, she realizes that she’s locked in Mike’s basement apartment. He has decided that she owes him something for saving her life and keeps her imprisoned with the hope that Mary Ann will fall in love with him.

Garfein crafts an uncomfortable narrative. Mike’s actions are disturbing, and yet Garfein holds back any explicit sexual threat for a time, making it unclear exactly what the man wants, as his thinking is muddled by alcohol and his own white knight complex. The director uses restraint in drawing both the attack at the start of Something Wild and Mike’s slow breaking down of his victim, leaving us to fill in some blanks, and never once being exploitative. Meeker manages to slowly twist his average Joe into a real creep, but avoids straying into cartoon villainy. For her role in their dynamic, Baker lets her anger bubble up, finally unleashing the grief and the pain in her own defense. It’s not just about physically fighting back, though, she is also strategic. Mary Ann tries to work out Mike’s angles, tries to disavow him of any notion that she’ll ever be the love of his life. In her efforts, we at last see Mary Ann as a true survivor. She can fight back in a way she could not during the initial assault, even if the results are questionable.

All of this is revealed without much ostentation. Garfein and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (People on Sunday [review], Eyes Without a Face) keep an even hand and a steady eye. All the exteriors of Something Wild were shot on location, and so Schüfftan captures New York as a particular time and place--and yet the city somehow also bends around Mary Ann, becoming almost like a dreamscape that she walks through unhindered. The black-and-white is lovely, and the restoration on this Blu-ray, while imperfect, is still exceptional, maintaining the genuine look of the original celluloid.

In the final scenes of Something Wild, the film takes some unexpected twists I will leave you to discover and interpret on your own. Yet, I will also point you again to the special feature with the filmmaker and Kim Morgan, as Garfein reveals his own intentions of the ending. His explanation may challenge your perceptions even more. His empathy as a storyteller allows him to see Mary Ann’s experience in ways that many of us may not if we accept everything at face value or filter it through our own prism.

In addition to the piece with Morgan (perhaps the director's biggest champion), Criterion also includes one of Garfein’s acting lectures, some background on the Actors Studio, and a new interview with Carroll Baker.

Something Wild is an essential release, reintroducing an unfairly ignored film to today’s audiences. Now, who do we have to petition to get Criterion to follow this up with a Blu-ray of The Strange One?

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SOMETHING WILD - #563

It's true what they say, you know, about how you always remember your firsts.

My sexual awakening can be traced through cinema thusly: I saw my first bra when my dad snuck me into National Lampoon's Animal House, sometime just prior to my starting school. I don't remember much else about that screening, but I do recall some heavy petting in the back of a car. Movies were contraband at that point, we weren't allowed to go due to church connections. My dad was an assistant pastor in suburban Michigan, and my very earliest movie memories are of seeing clandestine matinees in a college theatre. Mainly Bruce Lee stuff. And a bra in Animal House.

My first pair of boobs was Caddyshack. I don't know if it was during the original release, but it's possible, because the movie embargo broke the year prior with The Black Stallion. My mom placed her hand in front of my eyes, but since her palm was a few inches away from my face, I just moved my head to the side a little to see the bare breasts. To this day, I'm still a bit of a prude, so it at least had some effect.

And the first time I remember being turned on by a sex scene in a movie and not grossed out was Something Wild. I was 14 and I managed to catch the off-center comedy on cable after hearing Siskel and Ebert enthuse over the film. It wasn't the first time I had seen sex in a movie--times had changed so much, my dad had taken me to see Scarface and Flesh + Blood during their theatrical runs (both terrible then, both terrible now)--but none of the smut really connected. Given how many movies I saw with my parents, I can be forgiven feeling oogey about such action. Cable liberated me in that sense, giving me a way to view cinema unsupervised, and I taped Something Wild and ended up watching it multiple times. And, yes, I'm sure I watched the scene when Melanie Griffith mounts Jeff Daniels in the hotel more than the others. Perhaps I saw myself in the Daniels character, even if others probably didn't. He was a meek good guy hiding a rebel deep down; I was closer to the big-mouthed rebel hiding a nerd underneath his brash exterior.

I am now more than twice the age I was when I first saw Something Wild. Hell, I think I'm at least twice the age I was when last I saw it. That VHS is long gone, and so is the quirky time in which a movie like Something Wild could be made without having its weirdo tendencies smoothed out by heavy market research. Melanie Griffith's portrayal of Audrey, a.k.a. Lulu, wouldn't fly anymore. For one, she'd be botoxed and body-doubled to the point of no longer actually looking like a real woman; for another, prevailing mores would dictate she would have to be broken somehow. Audrey predates the coinage of the "manic pixie girl" by nearly two decades, so she's not actually a victim nor does she have any kind of mental problem. Sure, the liberated woman whose past catches up to punish her for her freedom somewhat fits the victim bill, but Audrey's plight is more like something out of an old film noir than it is a product of post-modern malaise. She's a conwoman and a thief, after all, who picks up Charlie Driggs (Daniels) because she sees an easy mark that she can manipulate to going along with her schemes.

The way I see it, the whole of Something Wild's first hour or so is a movie that could only be from the 1980s. There is a kind of quaint naiveté to how Demme presents the seediness of city life and the criminal misadventure that finance-man Charlie finds himself on. He is a suburban husband and father who gets hijacked by a crazy girl who takes him on a road trip fueled with booze, sex, robbery, and lies--some hers, but some his. The suburbs has its secrets, too. Clearly something was in the zeitgeist, since 1986 was also the year David Lynch cracked the suburban egg in Blue Velvet. Perhaps the weirdoes were just sick of the normals fobbing their neuroses off on them like they were blaming their farts on the dog. It was time to show America what really went on inside the house next door.

Digressing slightly, I had a similar reaction only just seeing Walter Hill's 1979 film The Warriors for the first time a few months back. The Warriors has a surprising lack of context, and so it was fascinating to imagine that its gangs were what Middle America actually imagined thugs and hooligans looked like in New York City at the time. If you lived in a town where there was no danger of you being mugged on the street, maybe it was perfectly reasonable to you that a crook in the Big Apple might wear a baseball uniform or clown make-up. It's this kind of sheltered misconceptions that Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye (Palmetto) were satirizing in Something Wild. Lulu had crazy clothes and listened to music that wasn't in English, so of course it was okay to get in a car with her and drive to Pennsylvania. If a guy like Charlie was going to cut loose, it should be with a woman like her. Where was the harm? Hell, you know you totally would.

Charlie ends up on the free-love freeway, leaving job and family behind, meeting Lulu's mother, discovering her name is Audrey, pretending to be her husband, going to her high school reunion. To be fair, her real crimes are just out of sight whenever he's around, he doesn't know she's stealing and lying. That's just the thing, Charlie is oblivious. Thus, he's not going to see it when the harsh reality comes speeding at him like an oncoming truck--a simile I don't throw out just for the hell of it (it's too obvious on its own). Compare Charlie at the start of the film when he first chases Lulu across the street and nearly gets run over to the confident Charlie at the end who outwalks a city bus. In other words, traffic is a signifier!

A young Ray Liotta plays this harsh reality. He is Ray, a figure from Audrey's past and a real bad guy. He is jealous of Charlie, and so he puts his imagined rival right in harm's way. No plausible deniability if you're on camera while the convenience store gets robbed. The back and forth escalates between them, with Charlie getting the chance to play the hero, but also getting that heroism shoved back in his face. Sure, Audrey's appearance normalizes more and more as the movie progresses, but even that's a noir trope: the femme fatale is the dark-haired beauty, but the gal whom the protagonist eventually runs to is the more earthy blonde, the kind of girl who can wear a summer dress unironically. The change in either character is not so simple as just Audrey becoming grounded and Charlie letting go. Demme and Frye are working to subvert that, and even after all this time, the culmination of Ray's psychotic rage is still shocking. The climactic scenes of Something Wild are proportional in violence to the alternate feel-good image of a multicultural world that Demme builds elsewhere in the picture. The filmmaker really goes all the way in the showdown, and it's easy to forget that it's coming, to be as blind as Charlie, because the goofy romance can be real distracting.

Which is really to say that Melanie Griffith can be real distracting. Something Wild kicked off a string of truly excellent performances from the actress. Or I should say, a string of excellent performances sprinkled in with a bunch of truly bad movies. Something Wild was such a flashpoint for Griffith, it's too bad she didn't make smarter choices after it came her way. Excepting her Oscar-nominated turn in Working Girl two years later, even most of her good movies are largely forgotten now. Yet, seeing her in Something Wild makes it easy to remember why she was the "It Girl" at least for a little while there. As Audrey, she is carefree and natural, comfortable with the appearance of going with the flow but also equally adept at showing that more was going on than was immediately obvious. In the early part of the movie, Demme gives us more time with Audrey than he does Charlie, and we're several steps ahead of the patsy in knowing what kind of game she may be running. As the character axis shifts and we move more into following Charlie, it actually mirrors what is going on with Audrey. She is growing tougher and hardening herself. Griffith shows the walls going up as the character tries to put Charlie on the other side. She knows the consequences they could face, and in her way, she's really the one playing the heroic card by trying to send Old Yeller into the woods. "Get away, I don't want you anymore, you dumb dog!"

A lot of the Demme trademark touches are evident in Something Wild. He over directs the weirdness, creating characters and environments that are too quirky to ever truly breathe in the real world--Audrey's wardrobe, Audrey's apartment, Audrey--and yet he somehow makes them work. The high school reunion is one uninterrupted party with long cuts of the director's current favorite band (in this case, the Feelies) doing their thing. The humor is black, the violence is even blacker. In much the same way that Gus Van Sant was his most Van Sant-like in My Own Private Idaho, I think Something Wild is the purest form of Demme. They both might have made weirder movies and better, more substantial movies, but these choices show both of these arististc oddballs at their most peculiar and expressive. You can't imagine anyone other than Gus Van Sant making Idaho, and only Jonathan Demme could have made Something Wild.

There is a lot going on in Something Wild that went right by me all those times I watched it as a teen. While it can be appreciated as the fun yet slightly sinister romp that it is regardless, there are deeper things about growing up and wrestling with nostalgia and dealing with the person you have become vs. the person you wanted to be that only have maximum impact after you've gathered a few years under your belt. For whatever strange notions about the world that Audrey has (to describe it as her mother did), the persona she has cultivated as Lulu is meant to both hide her identity (think Ava Gardner in The Killers) but also allow her to hang on to the kind of person she imagines herself to be--a little bit of a 1920s flapper, a little Bettie Page, a little Holly Golightly. (Okay, it's easier and easier to see what an influence that this had on my young psyche. The black stockings and the dark, bobbed hair alone....) By the time she gets back to her hometown, she is presenting herself as the woman her mother would have liked to see her become. By the time Something Wild ends, however, she has morphed into the woman she was always intended to be, an Eliza Doolittle of her own design, big hat and all, heading off to the races.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 10/08

Halloween is here, and I hit my goal for one horror movie a week for October. Go me!

In addition to those reviews, here are some other movies I was able to scare up reviews for in the past month:

IN THEATRES...

* Ashes of Time Redux, the restoration of Wong Kar-Wai's martial artist stunner. I was very excited to see this, as you will likely read!

* Blindness, a take on the post-apocalyptic genre where a disease strikes people like Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal blind, while leaving Julianne Moore with her sight so she can be Queen. I'm still torn on this film, and was almost going to rate it at "Rent It" right up until posting time. I am still struggling with whether or not its doldrums overpower the good bits or vice versa.

* Happy-Go-Lucky, the new Mike Leigh dramedy with a stellar performance from Sally Hawkins as the eternal clown.

* Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire film that really gives the genre a whole new lease on its undead life.

* Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme's unbalanced movie about family nearly stifles great turns from Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt as sisters trying to deal with their past as they move into the future.

* W., Oliver Stone's perplexing biopic of George W. Bush.

* What Just Happened, a Hollywood tell-all that tells nothing, despite some good work from Robert DeNiro. Based on a book by Art Linson, the story has been defanged beyond recognition.

ON DVD...

* Chaplin: 15th Anniversary Edition, the flawed biopic stays memorable thanks to Robert Downey, Jr.

* Flight of the Red Balloon, wherein one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, Hou Hsiao Hsien, pays tribute to one of my favorite children's films.

* Ludwig, the gigantic Luchino Visconti biography of the mad king of Bavaria. This took a while to get through, which is why I slowed down some. (Plus, I have some big sets I am starting, too.)

* Mondays in the Sun, a Javier Bardem vehicle about men struggling with unemployment in Spain. A surprisingly meaningful drama with good characters and a balance of humor.

* The Picture of Dorian Gray, the chilled 1940s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic. Directed by Albert Lewin.

* Six in Paris, an anthology of French New Wave directors tackling different neighborhoods in the City of Light. Produced by Barbet Schroeder, and featuring segments by Rohmer, Chabrol, and Godard.

* Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition, a two-disc examination of Orson Welles' troubled noir classic.

* The Unforeseen, a dreamy, soulful documentary about urban sprawl and its effect on Austin, Texas. Co-produced by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick.

* Warner Home Video Western Classics Collection, collecting six cowboy movies from the Warner Bros. vaults, only two of which--the Rod Serling-penned Saddle the Wind and the Gregory Peck-vehicle The Stalking Moon--are really worth it. Also features Anthony Mann's Cimarron, William Holden in Escape from Fort Bravo, and Richard Widmark as another charismatic bad guy in The Law & Jake Wade.