Directed ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Philadelphia’
JONATHAN DEMME Feb. 22, 1944 - April 26, 2017
Jonathan Demme, a Hollywood filmmaker who reached his commercial apex in the early 1990s with the Oscar-winning thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” and the AIDS discrimination drama “Philadelphia,” and who also made one of the most compelling rock music documentaries of all time, died April 26 at his home in New York. He was 73.
The cause was complications from esophageal cancer, his publicists confirmed in a statement.
After an apprenticeship with the exploitation king Roger Corman, grinding out low-budget, lurid fare with underclothed women, Mr. Demme built a genre-crossing career that showcased his versatility.
His portfolio encompassed offbeat blue-collar films such as “Handle With Care” (1977) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980) and enjoyable if anodyne Hollywood dramas and comedies from the 1980s (“Swing Shift,” “Something Wild,” “Married to the Mob”). He also developed a thriving sideline in documentary work that allowed him to indulge what he called his “obsessive interest in rock and roll.”
From his revered musical documentary “Stop Making Sense” (1984), about the Talking Heads, to “Rachel Getting Married” (2008), a dysfunctional-family drama starring Anne Hathaway, his films shared an affectionate generosity toward even the most shambolic characters.
“Very few directors have had Demme’s delicate intuitive feel for the ragged texture of life out of the mainstream,” Washington Post film critic Hal Hinson once wrote, “for the way we talk and separate and make love; for the look of lunch counters, bathrooms, and gas stations. Demme suffuses the people in his films with a warm acceptance, but he stands back as well, looking on with appreciation and detachment. This balance gives his films a floating, bemused quality that never seems sticky or cloying, a sense of events seen in their proper proportions.”
His creative mid-career peak was “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991). As sleekly executed as it was frightening, the movie starred Anthony Hopkins as the Chianti-loving cannibal Hannibal Lecter aiding the FBI in hunting down another serial killer. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby declared it “pop film making of a high order.” It swept the Oscars, winning best picture, best director, best actor (Mr. Hopkins) and best actress (Jodie Foster as an FBI employee).
Mr. Demme’s reward was a studio prestige project, “Philadelphia” (1993). It was one of the first major Hollywood films to address the AIDS crisis, but reviewers said the film was marred by a predictable, self-conscious seriousness and a script that seldom went beyond obvious heroes and villains.
The movie benefited enormously from an Oscar-winning performance by Tom Hanks as a gay white-collar lawyer who is fired when it is revealed he has contracted AIDS. Denzel Washington was the lawyer who, despite his initial prejudice against homosexuals, helps him defeat the establishment. (Mr. Demme had his friends Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young contribute songs for the soundtrack; Mr. Springsteen won an Oscar for “Streets of Philadelphia.”)
In his subsequent Hollywood directing jobs, Mr. Demme displayed technical competence but professed a certain joylessness in making “Beloved” (1998), a version of the Toni Morrison novel that starred Oprah Winfrey, and “The Truth About Charlie” (2002) and “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004), both remakes of vastly superior films from the 1960s.
He acknowledged, however, that they essentially allowed him to fund passion projects such as “Stop Making Sense.”
Regarded as a seminal contribution to its genre, “Stop Making Sense” took advantage of new digital recording technology and shunned hackneyed conventions of the form: audience reaction shots, interviews with bandmates and music critics, an emphasis on sybaritic lifestyle and personality.
With exhilarating clarity and sharp intelligence, Mr. Demme captured the intimate interplay, onstage and off, of the bandmates — always in service of the music.
“Many great directors have tried their hand at concert films, but few could match Demme’s skill at capturing their joy and their celebration of communal creation,” according to Rolling Stone magazine. “Taken together, his concert docs are one of the great collective odes — not just to making music but to being alive.”
For his part, Mr. Demme spoke of the concert film as the “purest form of filmmaking,” with no script, no advance planning, just the response of the camera to the action. He made several documentary films featuring Mr. Young (“Heart of Gold,” “Neil Young Trunk Show,” “Neil Young Journeys”), as well as a documentary of the British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock (”Storefront Hitchcock,” 1998). The pop singer Justin Timberlake, a fan of “Stop Making Sense,” sought out Mr. Demme to make “Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids” (2016).
In addition, Mr. Demme directed a documentary of the performance artist and monologuist Spalding Gray ("Swimming to Cambodia,” 1987) as well as “Jimmy Carter Man from Plains” (2007), focused on Mr. Carter’s post-presidential years.
Perhaps Mr. Demme’s finest political documentary was “The Agronomist” (2003), about the Haitian radio journalist and human rights activist Jean Dominique. The film is essentially the story of a death foretold, with Dominique continuing his anti-corruption broadcasts in the face of threats. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott called it “magnificent.”