Desperately Seeking Something

By RICHARD CORLISS

It should be an occasion for throwing hats and blowing horns. This Friday marks the opening of two films that were made separately by directors who were once husband and wife. Evelyn Purcell's Nobody's Fool and Jonathan Demme's Something Wild have more in common than the eleven-year marriage of their directors. Both are romantic comedies about a normal guy and a kooky gal made in a style we might call funky folkloric. The narratives are ever willing to stop in their circuitous tracks and wait appreciatively for an eccentric character to idle on by. Trouble is, it takes more than divorce papers and edgewise weirdies to inform a good picture these days.

Purcell's debut feature comes out of the bottom of Beth Henley's script drawer. The author of Crimes of the Heart and (in collaboration) True Stories has down-home flakes down pat, but here they are too pat. Meet -- as if you hadn't met them in Southern literature a hundred times before -- the irrepressible outcast (Rosanna Arquette), the sensitive wanderer (Eric Roberts) in search of Miz Right, the good-ole-girl barmaid (Mare Winningham), the ex-jock with itchy trousers (Jim Youngs). In her eye blink of a role, Winningham is a buoyant delight, and Youngs nicely fleshes out his cardboard stud, but everyone else goes under in a sea of mannerisms. Arquette brings a clangorous winsomeness to the sort of cracked-belle character that the young Katharine Hepburn portrayed so majestically in Morning Glory and Alice Adams. Rosanna grates; the film galls. If Nobody's Fool doesn't get on your nerves, you don't have any.

Demme (Melvin and Howard) is on higher ground and does a snappier dance. E. Max Frye's script offers a careering trip through the East Coast Nighttown previously explored by Desperately Seeking Susan, After Hours and Blue Velvet. Solid Citizen Jeff Daniels meets Madcap Airhead Melanie Griffith and in a trice is stripped, handcuffed, kidnaped, beaten up and plied with big wet licky kisses. Natch, he goes for it. "What are you gonna do," Melanie asks, "now that you've seen how the other half lives . . . the other half of you." Daniels holds together better than the movie, which lurches from romance to farce to terror. Only Ray Liotta, as a crew-cut sadist, blends the laughs and screams with a beguiling creepiness. Something Wild boasts cameo spots by Directors John Sayles and John Waters, as well as a cute turn by the moms of Demme and David Byrne (who wrote and sings the opening song). These badges of hipness stick out like a designer label stitched on an old pair of jeans. The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquav er.