Jonathan Demme, ‘Silence of the Lambs’ Director, Dies at 73
Courtesy of http://variety.com/2017/film/news/jonathan-demme-dead-silence-of-the-lambs-1202399122/
By Carmel Dagan,
Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme has
died of esophageal cancer and complications from heart disease, according
to published reports. He was 73 years old.
Demme is best known for directing “The Silence of the
Lambs,” the 1991 horror-thriller that was a box office smash and a critical
triumph. The story of an FBI analyst (Jodie Foster) who uses a charismatic
serial killer (Anthony Hopkins) to track a murderer became only the third film
in history to win Academy Awards in all the top five categories ( picture,
actor, actress, director, and adapted screenplay), joining the ranks of “It
Happened One Night” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Though he had his greatest success terrifying audiences,
most of Demme’s work was looser and quirkier. He showed a great humanism and
empathy for outsiders in the likes of “Melvin and Howard,” the story of a
service station owner who claimed to have been a beneficiary of Howard Hughes,
and “Something Wild,” a screwball comedy about a banker whose life is turned
upside down. He also scored with “Married to the Mob” and oversaw “Stop Making
Sense,” a documentary about the Talking Heads that is considered to be one of
the great concert films.
Following “The Silence of the Lambs,” Demme used his
clout to make “Philadelphia,” one of the first major studio films to tackle the
AIDS crisis and a movie that won Tom Hanks his first Oscar for playing a gay
lawyer.
The director most recently made 2015’s “Ricki and the
Flash,” starring Meryl Streep as an aging rocker who must return home to
Indiana due to a family crisis. The film disappointed at the box office and
reviews were muted.
Demme’s box office prowess waned in the late 1990’s and
early aughts. There was an ill-advised 2002 “Charade” remake “The Truth About
Charlie,” which starred Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton and proved a
disservice to the classic Stanley Donen original. He also failed to convince
critics that his 2004’s big-budget,,M high-profile remake of “The Manchurian
Candidate” needed to be made. The film starred Denzel Washington, Liev
Schreiber and Meryl Streep, which hit in the middle of a contentious
presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, but failed to make
much of a splash.
He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for
directing “Swimming to Cambodia” in 1988, and his 2009 feature “Rachel Getting
Married” drew Indie Spirit nominations for best feature and director.
Demme won the International Documentary Association’s
Pare Lorentz Award in 1997 for his film “Mandela,” and his docu “Jimmy Carter
Man From Plains” picked up the Fipresci Award at the Venice Film Festival in
2007. He made two documentaries about Haiti, 1988’s “Haiti Dreams of Democracy”
and 2003’s critically acclaimed “The Agronomist.” Of the latter the New York
Times said, “The turbulence that led to the removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide
from Haiti’s presidency gives ‘The Agronomist,’ a superb new documentary by
Jonathan Demme, a melancholy timeliness. Its hero, Jean Dominique, embodies the
fragile, perpetual hope that Haiti might someday nurture a just and decent
political order.” Another standout documentary was 1992’s “Cousin Bobby,”
about Demme’s cousin, an Episcopalian priest in Harlem.
In addition to “Stop Making Sense,” Demme did
documentaries on the Pretenders, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, and he
also directed quite a number of music videos, drawing a Grammy
nomination in 1987 for best long form music video for “Sun City: Artists United
Against Apartheid.”
Demme came to the attention of Hollywood with the 1980
film “Melvin and Howard,” in which Jason Robards starred as a bearded,
bedraggled Howard Hughes encountered by struggling Everyman Melvin Dumont, who
helps Howard out — only to be left $156 million in a Hughes will of dubious
authenticity. The film worked because it was not about Hughes but about Dumont,
played by Paul Le Mat (one of Demme’s favorite actors). Roger Ebert said:
“Dummar is the kind of guy who thinks they oughta make a movie out of his life.
This time, he was right.” The film drew three Oscar nominations, winning for
best supporting actress (Mary Steenburgen) and original screenplay (Bo
Goldman), while Robards also drew a nomination.
The 1984 film “Swing Shift,” a romantic dramedy set on
the homefront during WWII and starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, was
directed by Demme but taken out of his hands by the studio and recut,
reportedly to make Hawn’s characterization more flattering.
The same year, however, he also directed Talking Heads
concert film “Stop Making Sense.” Reviewing it when it was re-released in 1999,
the San Francisco Chronicle wrote of the “tingle of satisfaction” that comes
“when a piece of entertainment is so infectious, so original and so correct in
its judgments that a viewer can sink into his seat — secure in the knowledge
that you’re in good hands. Has there ever been a live concert film as vibrant
or as brilliantly realized?”
In 1986 Demme perfectly paired Jeff Daniels and Melanie
Griffiths in the offbeat, New Wave-flavored indie comedy “Something Wild” and
drew an erotically anarchical performance from Griffiths — she quickly
convinces Daniels’ ordinary business guy that she’s capable of anything. The
first hour of the film is, as Roger Ebert suggested, “filled with such a
headlong erotic charge that it’s hard to see how he can sustain it” — and Demme
couldn’t, but even the second half wasn’t bad. The film featured an impressive
debut from Ray Liotta as Griffiths’ lunatic ex-boyfriend as well as
performances by John Waters, John Sayles and cult band the Feelies.
Film Quarterly declared in 1987 that Demme’s career in
the 1980s “represents the interesting case of an American director
experimenting with film-making at once trendy and radical.” This was
exemplified by both “Stop Making Sense” and “Something Wild.”
Demme next shot brilliant monologuist Spalding Gray’s “Swimming
to Cambodia” for the screen, with excellent results all around. The Austin
Chronicle said, “Laurie Anderson’s tribal score and Demme’s perfectly executed
direction take us right inside the mind of this eccentric genius.”
The director’s 1988 comedy “Married to the
Mob,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Alec Baldwin, with excellent
supporting performances by Dean Stockwell as the Mafia boss and Mercedes Ruehl
as his far fiercer wife, was a critical and popular success. The New York
Times said: “Jonathan Demme is the American cinema’s king of amusing artifacts:
blinding bric-a-brac, the junkiest of jewelry, costumes so frightening they
take your breath away. Mr. Demme may joke, but he’s also capable of suggesting
that the very fabric of American life may be woven of such things, and that it
takes a merry and adventurous spirit to make the most of them. In addition, Mr.
Demme has an unusually fine ear for musical novelty, and the sounds that waft
through his films heighten the visual impression of pure, freewheeling
vitality. If making these films is half as much fun as watching them, Mr. Demme
must be a happy man.”
The 2008 film “Rachel Getting Married,” which bore some
similarities to Noah Baumbach’s 2007 effort “Margot at the Wedding,”
starring Nicole Kidman, while prefiguring Demme’s own “Ricki and the Flash,”
provided an excellent vehicle for Anne Hathaway to demonstrate acting ability
in a largely unsympathetic but intriguing role of a young woman, out of rehab
long enough to attend the wedding of the sister she’s jealous of.
Demme directed an adaptation of the Ibsen play “The
Master Builder,” penned by and starring Wallace Shawn, in 2013. In 2015, in
addition to “Ricki and the Flash,” he directed the docu-series “The New Yorker
Presents,” bringing to life the iconic magazine.
Robert Jonathan Demme was born in Baldwin, Long Island,
New York, and attended the University of Florida. Like John Sayles, he began
his directing career in Roger Corman’s stable, helming women’s prison
exploitation film “Caged Heat” in 1974; nostalgic road trip film “Crazy Mama,”
starring Cloris Leachman, in 1975; and Peter Fonda action film “Fighting Mad”
in 1976.
The Altman-esque look at small town residents who are CB
radio users “Handle With Care” (aka “Citizens Band”) (1977), starring Paul
Le Mat and Candy Clark, earned a review (albeit not a glowing one) in the New
York Times: “Handle With Care” is “so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme’s
tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters
that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which
characters who couldn’t communicate directly come to understand one another at
long last.”
He followed “Handle With Care” with the Hitchcockian
thriller “Last Embrace,” starring Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin, but his next
film, “Melvin and Howard” shared the sensibility of “Handle With Care” but
showed an assured, mature director, and the acclaim it received firmly
established Demme’s Hollywood career.
In 2006 Demme was presented with the National Board of
Review’s Billy Wilder Award. Demme’s nephew, director Ted Demme, died in 2002
at age 38.
Demme was married to director-producer Evelyn Purcell. He
is survived by second wife Joanne Howard and their three children:
Ramona, Brooklyn and Jos.
