Not Enough Wild Things

The Ice Storm is extraordinary in the way it acknowledges the pervasiveness of sex in human life without going the step further to condone it with the old "consenting adults" nonsense. In one sense, The Ice Storm could be an instructional video advocating Family Values--if you fool around, bad things "will happen to you. Just a few hours after Allen and Sheridan have sex, Sheridan's son (Elijah Wood) dies in a freak accident. On the other hand, Kline's family survives intact, both physically and, hopefully, emotionally, and there's at least a suggestion that the great void at the center of his marriage might never have been dealt with had he not been unfaithful. Sex--the perfect imperfection--takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

That said, thank you, Mama and Papa Dillon, for giving us Matt, and thank you, Matt, for your lunatic performance in Wild Things, a movie that strikes a decisive blow for hungry, carnal low-mindedness on the big screen. The story opens as high school guidance counselor Dillon scrawls the word SEX across a blackboard and, after pausing for effect, adds the word CRIMES. "What constitutes a sex crime?" asks police detective Kevin Bacon, volunteering his expertise for the good of the town's teens. "Not get-tin' any!" one of them shouts out. Leave it to our children to give voice to our unspoken fears swirling in the millennial malaise, eh?

Dillon soon gets unjustly accused of raping two of his students--the white-trash Neve Campbell and the rich, heathenly Denise Richards. "I don't fuck my students," Dillon soberly declaims to his feral, ambulance-chasing lawyer (Bill Murray). We believe Dillon; he draws our sympathy as he loses his job and his house, but not his dignity. Spearheading the case against him is detective Bacon, who drives out to Campbell's trailer after getting an urgent call from her and gets to hear some of the all-time best, bizarro-noir lines, of the cinematic century. "Jesus, it took you guys long enough," Campbell complains to him. "What if someone was trying to strangle me, or fuck me in the ass, even?"

At Dillon's trial, Campbell is forced to admit on the stand that both she and Richards were lying, acting out a vendetta against Dillon. The case is dismissed, whereupon Murray negotiates a libel settlement against Richards's rich mom, Theresa Russell. Next time we see Dillon he's in a motel room with Campbell and Richards. The three of them concocted the scheme to get eight-and-a-half million dollars from Russell. How do they celebrate? By basting each other with champagne and having a little three-way organ-grinding session that is such a wicked about-face from Dillon's assumed persona that we want to get up and cheerlead him as he's sucking on Richards's tits--Yeah! Go, baby! Do it! No need for coy sexual conjuring here. Wild Things is, the ultimate "fuck you" to '90s prudery, preciousness and hypocrisy.

So, here we are at the millennium, with catastrophes like the Y2K to avert and a billion more souls to feed. For my money, the thing we should be worrying about is how to get real, meaningful, recognizably human sex back up on the big screen. "It's not that I'm against sex," says Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex, "but... it always ends up in kids or disease or, like, you know, relationships." Think long and hard about those words--and then, for the sake of humanity, and even more importantly, for the sake of movies, forget every last one of them. Then go out and scratch that phantom limb or, at the very least, rent Last Tango in Paris.

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Michael Angeli wrote about men who cry in movies for the July 98 issue of Movieline.

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