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Madness of love, not Nietzsche but David Byrne serenading the New York skyline, "whatever turns you on." Risk to the Wall Street stuffed shirt (Jeff Daniels) means skipping out on diner bills, the "closet rebel" meets the real thing in the jangly punkette (Melanie Griffith) beckoning him into her emerald Pontiac. "You game?" He soon finds himself manacled to a motel bed, forced into a phone call with his boss while his abductor goes down on him, afterwards laughing with frazzled delight as the handcuffs dangle in the shower. The jaunt continues in the siren's Pennsylvania hometown, their masquerade as a married couple bumps up against her real husband (Ray Liotta), just out of jail. "You gotta fight for a woman like this." Jonathan Demme's darkening madcap spree, euphoria and menace in sustained play, a fizzy oasis in the Eighties desert. Identities are fluid guises, black bob and African choker versus blonde pixie and polka-dot sundress or bloodied suit exchanged for gas-station shorts. ("Attempt to be cool" is the advice of the clerk witnessing the square's epiphanic reinvention.) A profusion of details informs the ecstatic cross-cultural landscape, from tiny red-white-blue hats at the high-school reunion to a liquor store cashier's calabash pipe to the young rap quartet on the margins of a stakeout. And yet the vibrant screen can abruptly yield to the jerky grays of a bodega's surveillance camera as violence spills into the joyride. The Feelies covering Freddy Fender, "strange notions about life," postmodernism's smiling face. The psycho on a vengeful tear still giggles at the squeaky doll in the hijacked car, Liotta's demonic greaser made palpably human at the knife's edge of Demme's frontal camera. "The other half of you." The proximity is to Scorsese's After Hours but the kinship is with Armitage's Miami Blues. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. With Margaret Colin, Dana Preu, Jack Gilpin, Tracey Walter, Charles Napier, Robert Ridgely, John Sayles, Steve Scales, John Waters, and Sister Carol.
--- Fernando F. Croce |