Liev Schreiber in Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
[Also published on Letterboxd.]
Can't write anything cohesive on Jonathan Demme, who died today of complications from esophageal cancer. He meant too much to me, and I'd like to save many of the thoughts I have for a longer-form piece of work. So, some fragments:
- I met Demme a few times in life, most recently on February 4th of this year, at a special Film Society of Lincoln Center screening of his ebullient concert documentary (and now final feature) Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids. I recorded his brief introduction, which I've embedded here. At the end, he dedicates the screening to Judge James Robart, who put the kibosh on Donald Trump and company's first Muslim travel ban.
- I shook Demme's hand and briefly talked to him after that screening of Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids. I'd done the same back in 2004 at the New York Film Festival press screening for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady where I was able to hand off a Great Director profile I'd written about him for the online magazine Senses of Cinema. The route it took to get into his hands is interesting: At the time I wrote it, I was working at Oxford University Press, and while walking toward the subway one evening, I heard a familiar voice behind me. It was Demme, alongside his frequent cinematographer Tak Fujimoto. They'd just come from a day's shooting on his Manchurian Candidate remake at the building next to my office. Since I was walking in front of them, I kind of reverse-stalked them, slowing my stride so I could listen in on whatever it is they were talking about, most of it of-the-day minutiae. I guess I should have been ashamed, though what I really kicked myself for at the time was not having a copy of my Demme Great Director profile on my person. A few months later, I saw Demme at another NYFF press screening, and decided this was the universe telling me something. So I made sure to have a copy at all subsequent press screenings. Finally, there he was, and I took the chance. I walked up to where Demme was sitting…and he was immediately accosted by one of the more officious members of the New York film community at that time. I stood to the side as if consigned to the dunce corner, waiting for their conversation to end. It went on and on and on. Finally, Demme was free and started to make a beeline to the bathroom. I was brazen enough to stop him with a slightly pleading, "Mr. Demme?" He turned, and the look on his face said (to my interpretation), "Oh, shit! A kid with a script." I quickly got around to saying this was an article about his career that I'd written and I wanted to give him a copy. He suddenly relaxed, smiled and took the piece in hand. "Oh!" he said, very curious and very kind, "Maybe I'll learn something." He later wrote me an email (that I sadly no longer have) saying how grateful he was for my thoughts on his work. I wrote back a much-too-effusive reply that ended with my proposing a Hitchcock-Truffaut style interview book. I never received a reply, and I really hate thinking back on my brazenness and intrusiveness in these encounters. I have to believe he took it all in stride, and the compliment by itself was plenty. That Great Director piece is still up at Senses of Cinema. I'd write it much differently now (and may do such a revision in the near-future). But it is who I was. And here it is: http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/demme/
- I don't know if there's any way to say this without it coming off pissy or antagonistic. I don't mean it in this way, and I'm all for differences of opinion. Still, I've never understood the tendency several in the critical community have to divide Demme's career into pre- and post-Silence of the Lambs, with everything that came after Silence (and sometimes including it) viewed as a pale shadow of prior glories. Silence itself seems a more-than-natural extension of Demme's Roger Corman-sired, exploitation film apprenticeship, and it spoke to me deeply, then as now, precisely because of its quote-Problematic-unquote nature. (That's fodder for a much longer piece.) Philadelphia comes off as the more compromised film, because of its suffocating good intentions, though there's still plenty there (such as the opera scene, or the final wake sequence) to admire. I'm still saddened that Demme's profoundly evocative and upsetting adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved is so underrated (and badly underrepresented on home video). It's among my favorites of his post-Silence output, among which I'd also put his Manchurian Candidate remake (with a vulnerable, never-rawer Denzel Washington), both Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (each the equal, in my estimation, of Stop Making Sense), and the supremely misunderstood The Truth About Charlie, which transposes the inventive, go-for-broke ethos of the nouvelle vague to modern times. In 2012, I spoke at length about the latter with my friend Peter Labuza, on his podcast The Cinephiliacs: http://www.thecinephiliacs.net/2012/08/episode-4-keith-uhlich-truth-about.html
- Last Demme thought for now: I named Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids as my favorite film of 2016. And I'd do the same, circa 1985, with Demme's 11-minute music video for New Order's "The Perfect Kiss," embedded below. It's primarily close-ups of the band as they play the song beginning to end. (The one master shot, cut to halfway through, hits with a primal force.) And there's a two-shot of bassist Peter Hook and who I presume is a toe-tapping techie (photographed so as to suggest an apparition) that never fails to move me. The cinematographer was Henri Alekan who shot Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), Dassin's Topkapi (1964), Losey's The Trout (1982), among others, and would go on to work with Wenders on Wings of Desire (1987). The no-less-talented Agnès Godard is also credited in the end titles, likely for Assistant Camera. Give it a watch:
