Jonathan Demme’s Films—Funny or Dark, But Always Human
The creator of ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Stop Making Sense’ died at age 73.
Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who died Wednesday of complications from esophogeal cancer, was a filmmaker whose work ranged from cheap exploitation movies (Caged Heat) to innovative concert films (Stop Making Sense) to Oscar-winning thrillers (The Silence of the Lambs) to socially important dramas (Philadelphia).
Demme was also a much-loved collaborator whose enthusiasms ranged widely and who was remembered as ever joyful and humanistic, no matter the medium or genre in which he worked. He was 73 when he died.
“I am heartbroken to lose a friend, a mentor, a guy so singular and dynamic you’d have to design a hurricane to contain him,” Silence of the Lambs star Jodie Foster said in a statement:
Jonathan was as quirky as his comedies and as deep as his dramas. He was pure energy; the unstoppable cheerleader for anyone creative. Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and will always be a champion of the soul. JD, most beloved, something wild, brother of love, director of the lambs. Love that guy. Love him so much.
One of Demme’s last directing jobs, an episode of Fox’s Shots Fired, aired on Wednesday, the day of his death, Deadline reported. His last work, an episode of the upcoming Netflix series Seven Seconds, has yet to screen.
A review of Demme’s most important work reveals the progression of his artistry.
Caged Heat (1974)
Demme’s first feature film was a women-in-prison exploitation film for producer Roger Corman.
At Corman’s encouragement, Demme infused the film with a bit of social satire and a few surprises while hewing strictly to the violence and nudity audiences expected from the genre.
The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips saw in it the seeds of Demme’s future work.
His first feature project as writer-director, the 1974 women-in-chains schlocker Caged Heat, pointed the way for a commercial artist devoted to giving the audience what it wants, sort of. Mainly, slyly, he gave the audience unexpected treats, the sorts of character details that stick in the mind, and then linger, the way Jason Robards’ a cappella rendition of Bye Bye Blackbird in Melvin and Howard lingers in the darkness.
Working with Corman also instilled in Demme “the values of populism and crowd-pleasing, and simply getting movies made on an industrial basis, and he developed this ethos which he endowed with something of the indie new wave spirit, morphing into 1980s brashness,” Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said.
Melvin and Howard (1980)
A rambling comedy based on the real-life story of Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) had named him as a $156 million beneficiary in a hand-written will.
The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called it “commercial American movie-making of a most expansive, entertaining kind”:
It would be difficult to a imagine a better way to begin the 18th New York Film Festival than with the showing tonight of Jonathan Demme’s sharp, engaging, very funny, anxious comedy, Melvin and Howard, a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century, as old debts are being called in and life has become a series of repossessions.
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Critics have hailed Demme’s concert film as perhaps the best of its kind, rewriting the rules of how such movies are made. It won the National Society of Film Critics award for best documentary and maintains a 97 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Demme shot the New Wave band Talking Heads in December 1983, at the peak of its powers, over a three-night gig at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre as the band promoted its album Speaking in Tongues.
“I’ve come to believe, and I kind of felt this when we did Stop Making Sense, that shooting live music is kind of like the purest form of filmmaking,” Demme told the Associated Press last year. “There’s no script to worry about. It’s not a documentary, so you don’t have to wonder where this story is going and what we can use. It’s just: Here come the musicians. Here come the dancers. The curtain goes up. They have at it, and we get to respond in the best way possible to what they’re doing up there.”
No less a critical luminary than The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael loved the movie:
The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. … Stop Making Sense is the only current movie that’s a dose of happiness from beginning to end. … Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy — which turns out to be just what you wanted. …
And Demme, by barely indicating the visual presence of the audience until the end, intensifies the closed-off, hermetic feeling. His decision to keep the camerawork steady (the cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, used six mounted cameras, one hand-held, and one Panaglide) and to avoid hotsy-totsy, MTV-style editing concentrates our attention on the performers and the music.
Something Wild (1986)
This action comedy (and Demme’s 1988 Married to the Mob) mark his period of zany New Wave-inflected comedies centered on smart, sexy women and the hapless men who drift into their orbits.
It is notable for breakout performances by its stars—Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels and a young Ray Liotta.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw observed that the movie captured a particular moment in time:
It became part of what was loosely called the “yuppie disaster” genre (of which Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, though not the woeful film version, became a key example.) Something Wild was a satire about the uptight conformism that underlay Reaganite America. Demme also gave a break to Ray Liotta in his pre-GoodFellas period.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
This artful crime thriller, based on Thomas Harris’ novel, became a massive worldwide hit, made Demme the toast of Hollywood and answered the question: Can a horror film about a cannibalistic serial killer win an Oscar?
The answer was yes. The Silence of the Lambs won Academy Awards in all five top categories: best picture, best director (Demme), best actor (Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter), best actress (Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling) and best adapted screenplay (Ted Tally).
Critics hailed the film, with Roger Ebert eventually adding it to his list of all-time great movies:
The popularity of Jonathan Demme’s movie is likely to last as long as there is a market for being scared. Like Nosferatu, Psycho and Halloween, it illustrates that the best thrillers don’t age. Fear is a universal emotion and a timeless one. But Silence of the Lambs is not merely a thrill show. It is also about two of the most memorable characters in movie history, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, and their strange, strained relationship (“people will say we’re in love,” Lecter cackles).
The Guardian’s Bradshaw gives credit to Demme for crafting that relationship:
It was Demme who orchestrated Hopkins and Foster’s great scenes together, creating big moments, big scares, big closeups. Demme shaped one of the great dialogue scenes of Hollywood history: Lecter and Clarice Starling’s tense, needling, teasing back-and-forth either side of his reinforced glass screen. Demme had found a way of linking Dr Lecter and Starling with the murky psychological forces behind myths which had mastered the public in the past: Beauty and the Beast, or King Kong and Fay Wray, or Count Dracula and Lucy Westenra.
One interesting aside: Hopkins was not Demme’s first choice to play Lecter, he told Deadline:
It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in The Elephant Man. He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good. What if you cast Anthony Hopkins in the part of Dr. Lecter, who is not the worst doctor, but he’s a … good doctor turned bad? That was my engine for Anthony Hopkins. …
Sean Connery was the only other person I thought could be amazing for this. Connery has that fierce intelligence and also that serious physicality. I love Tony Hopkins, but Sean Connery could be amazing. So to take the most commercial path, because Connery was flying very high at the time, we sent the script to Sean Connery first. Word came back shortly that he thought it was disgusting and wouldn’t dream of playing that part. So, great, now we can go to Tony Hopkins.
In fact, Gene Hackman was originally planning to direct and star in Silence, but backed out of the project. Hackman’s exit opened the door for Demme, Hopkins and one of the greatest thrillers in film history.
Philadelphia (1993)
This groundbreaking film — from a script by Oscar-nominated writer Ron Nyswaner, inspired in part by a true story — was the first major studio movie to deal with the issue of HIV and AIDS and the issue of gay rights during the plague years. (The subject had been previously dramatized in TV miniseries and the independent film Longtime Companion.)
Star Tom Hanks won an Oscar for his portrayal of a gay lawyer who is forced out of the closet by his illness and sues his former employer for wrongful termination. Bruce Springsteen also won an Oscar for his song Streets of Philadelphia.
Ebert praised the film at the time of its release:
Philadelphia is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease. It’s a ground-breaker like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), the first major film about an interracial romance; it uses the chemistry of popular stars in a reliable genre to sidestep what looks like controversy.
The film was well-intentioned but criticized at the time by some who felt it didn’t go far enough in its depiction of a gay relationship and that it focused too much attention on the arc of its straight protagonist, played by Denzel Washington.
But Tim Teeman at the Daily Beast said it may be time to reassess the film:
The criticism that greeted Philadelphia was understandable and valid, but watching it now — older and a little more forgiving — everything that seemed remiss about it does seem radical, albeit tentatively so: the challenging of both institutional and personal homophobia, the sketching of a gay relationship underscored by love (however tentatively that relationship is evoked), and Tom Hanks at the heart of this, dying in front of you: Mr. Decency, Mainstream America Guy himself.
Just Hanks’s presence in the film as its central character gives the movie a weight, anchor, and reach into hearts and minds no other actor at that moment could.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Demme continued directing throughout the 90s and 2000s, on both documentaries and narrative features. Of the latter, one of most notable is this intimate story of a damaged young woman who returns home for her sister’s wedding and gloriously, heartbreakingly and hysterically opens up every old wound. The film earned its star, Anne Hathaway, her first Oscar nomination and was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Feature and Best Director.
Demme approached the film almost like a home movie, as Shortlister Chris Lowell observed in his intro to the film which you can watch below. Camera operators were dressed as wedding guests and allowed to move around the big party scenes, providing a sponteneity and realism uncommon to family dramas. And Demme put his concert documentary talents to work, making brilliant use of musical performances occuring during the wedding weekend.
Bonus: Demme as cheerleader. Literally
People have praised Demme for shepherding others’ projects, producing works for colleagues and even boosting the prospects of people he hadn’t met.
Max Wong, the executive producer of the 2000 cheerleading movie Bring It On, told MTV in 2015 that his project had been going nowhere for years. Until Demme stepped in after someone sent him a copy of the script.
Jonathan Demme flipped out over the project and called Stacey Snider who was then head of Universal and was like, “Oh my God, this is such a jam. You have the freshest thing I’ve read in so many years, you are a genius.” Literally 48 hours later, I was sitting at a meeting at Universal, and we’re being told like, “You’re the architects of Bring It On,” and “This is so brilliant.” We were immediately put into production after that meeting, and we had 90 days to find a director. For four years we’d been begging and scraping, and then literally overnight, all of a sudden our film had traction.
What’s your favorite Demme movie?
Stream Demme’s Stop Making Sense on Tribeca Shortlist now with your free trial.
