Postscript: Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

Jonathan Demme on the set of “The Manchurian Candidate” from 2004.
Jonathan Demme on the set of “The Manchurian Candidate,” from 2004.PHOTOGRAPH BY PARAMOUNT / EVERETT

A fellow named Melvin Dummar comes across this guy—“a strange ol’ weirdo wino, layin’ out in the middle of the desert,” with a busted shoulder and a bloody ear. Melvin hauls him into his pickup and drives him to Las Vegas, where the old man asks to go. Along the way, they talk and sing; after some coaxing, the passenger even croons “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Then, after thunder and rain, he rolls down his window and sniffs the air. “Greasewood and sage,” he says. Before they part, he asks for money, and Melvin hands over the contents of his pockets—a palmful of loose change. “That’s it,” he adds. “That’s all I got.”

Such is the prelude, both easygoing and far-reaching, to “Melvin and Howard” (1980). Melvin is played by Paul Le Mat, and Howard, if you trust the movie, is Howard Hughes, played by Jason Robards. The director is Jonathan Demme, who died on Wednesday, at the age of seventy-three. Everything that there was to like about Demme is present in the scene: the contagious warmth that he feels toward his characters; the appeal to all the senses, not excluding smell; the consoling thought that, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, music should not be far away; and the life-giving mix of movement and stasis—two people just sitting there, revealing something of themselves, while the truck chews up the miles and the day breaks free of the night.

Most of the tributes paid to Demme, in the past few days, have marvelled at the range of goods that was stocked, as it were, in the storefront of his films. Try the early exploitation flicks of the nineteen-seventies, like “Caged Heat” and “Crazy Mama,” made under the aegis of Roger Corman. Or the antsy and energetic comedies of the eighties, “Married to the Mob” and “Something Wild,” succeeded, at the start of the following decade, by the solid studio pictures, “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” that came away with Academy Awards. Dotted through Demme’s career, meanwhile, were the music videos and the music documentaries, which harkened to figures as disparate as Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young (twice), the Pretenders, and, of course, the Talking Heads, in the imperishable hipness of “Stop Making Sense” (1984). Only last year, Demme filmed Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids in concert at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas—not far from where the hobo billionaire of “Melvin and Howard” asked to be dropped off, at the rear of his own hotel.

This chop and change suggests a reluctance to settle, not merely in a choice of genres but often in the mood space of a single film. Nobody who saw “Something Wild,” in 1986, can ever forget the giddying swerve of the plot. Jeff Daniels, as Charlie, is hardly the first stiff to be loosened up by a dangerous dame (think of Henry Fonda in “The Lady Eve,” being led in a merry dance by Barbara Stanwyck), but in the hands of Demme, with the hard-staring help of Ray Liotta, the danger becomes a blood sport. A pair of Hitchcockian handcuffs serves first as an accessory to sex and then as a shackle to bind the hero while the villain, in the next room, plies his demonic trade. You want to know if screwball can be used as an offensive weapon? Look and learn.

As for “The Silence of the Lambs,” one cause of its endurance, and the reason that, however busy I may be, I am incapable of dragging myself away whenever it plays on TV, is that its contents shift with every viewing. As we follow Clarice Starling on her first visit to Hannibal Lecter, down the long walk past the other cells, we hear the deep churn of the musical theme, and our scalps, as ordained, begin to prickle; and what do we discover, behind the see-through wall? A sprightly figure, standing to greet the lady, as erect as a butler, with the spectre of a smile. The gourmet has found his amuse-gueule. From here on, the horror of the film will be garnished with comedy, while the comedy (and this is the creepiest touch of all) will bear the rich savor of romance. “People will say we’re in love,” Lecter says, when the young F.B.I. trainee returns to him later in the tale—for a tip, for a clinching clue, or because she can’t help herself. Their expressions, viewed head-on, fill the whole landscape of the screen. Each can see nothing but the other.

That stark composition returns, in very different circumstances, at the end of “Philadelphia,” when the dying man (Tom Hanks) bids farewell to his beloved (Antonio Banderas). Hanging over that film—so timely in 1993, and so dated now, for all its tender and well-meaning ambitions—is a sense that it was, in part, an act of atonement for “The Silence of the Lambs.” Charges of homophobia had been levelled at the character of Buffalo Bill, the killer whom Starling hunts, despite the fact that Demme took explicit pains, as Thomas Harris had done in the novel, to disclaim any link between violence and the transgender community. In consequence, there were protests at the time of release. To someone of Demme’s patent decency, those will have struck home.

The profession of movie director is not one that we instantly associate with the modest and the benign, but somehow, like Anthony Minghella, Demme rose through the ranks. What was a nice guy like him doing in a job like that? Well, he was schooled by Corman, a gentleman on the throne of schlock, who oversaw, with approval, the ascent of his many protégés. (The roster is laughably distinguished: Scorsese, Coppola, Nicholson, Stallone, and so forth. James Cameron designed the spaceship for the Corman-produced “Battle Beyond the Stars.”) To listen to Demme and Corman shoot the breeze, in their commentary on “Crazy Mama,” is like hearing a couple of veterans recalling their comrades-in-arms, without rancor or rivalry (“Jim Backus, Mr. Magoo, God bless him; he was a delight,” Demme says, scanning the credit sequence), and an ancient dispute about a montage is fondly laid to rest. What the master made plain, according to Demme, was that, “if you lose the viewer's eye, you’re going to lose the viewer’s interest. He also stressed the importance of having as many characters as possible that are in every way just as interesting as your main characters, even if they get less screen time.”

That is a crucial creed, because it implies not simply a visual knack but a reserve of moral generosity. Between “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” Demme made “Cousin Bobby,” about Robert Castle, an Episcopalian minister in Harlem: a firebrand built like a fortress. I still remember Demme standing in the frame, arms folded, putting questions to his cousin and watching him at work, even if the matter in hand was something as prosaic as a pothole. There was a persistent liberal ardor to Demme’s politics (witness his 2007 film about Jimmy Carter), but he was also blessed by a larger liberalism: the imaginative outreach, hard to discern in the rampant studio movies of today, which assumes that everybody is worth stopping for—that there will always be folks who repay the camera’s attention. What he radiated, before or behind the lens, was an unstinting curiosity, and a faith that the most reliable map of character was the human face.

That faith, rather than nepotism, led him to cast the Reverend Castle in five more films—first “Philadelphia,” then “Beloved” (1998), “The Truth About Charlie” (2002), “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004), and “Rachel Getting Married” (2008). The last of these, starring Anne Hathaway, found favor in some quarters, yet its fretfulness seemed a small thing when set beside the shimmying tensions of “Something Wild,” and even Demme loyalists had to admit that the later movies suffered an unaccountable loss of pressure. “The Truth About Charlie,” especially, looked all the more forlorn because it was a remake of “Charade,” and there is no known galaxy in which Mark Wahlberg could be an adequate substitute for Cary Grant. Not too many people saw “Ricki and the Flash” (2015), Demme’s final feature, despite the zest of Meryl Streep as the middle-aged rocker of the title, yet the movie is worth revisiting, in the wake of Demme’s passing, because it proves that his inquisitive eye had lost little of its gleam. He was, among his other talents, a terrific picker of extras, and as Ricki performs in bars, or at family gatherings, he dishes up, in passing glimpses, a fine assortment of his fellow-citizens.

Demme was a man for small towns and back roads. He liked those pockets of America where there was fun to be had, at a bargain price, and weakness to be gently laid bare. Hence his penchant for Melvin, a near-loser with a wish list of hopes, and for the tallness of Melvin’s tale. Whether the Howard he came across, that night in the desert, really was Howard Hughes, as legend insists, was not the sort of conundrum to bother Demme, and I doubt if he gave a damn whether the infamous “Mormon will”—in which, years later, Hughes allegedly left more than a hundred and fifty million dollars to Melvin in gratitude for his Samaritan deed, like a mega-Magwitch rewarding Pip—was the genuine article or a fake. What Demme knew for certain, because his grip on our everyday fears and fancies was so secure, is that we want to believe Melvin, and that Melvin, the poor dope, wants to believe himself. The stories that we tell, in other words, may not always be true, and yet they are true of us, and that will have to do. The loss of Jonathan Demme is a sad surprise, for the films that he bequeaths to us remain, to an uncommon degree, the work of a good man.