‘Silence of the Lambs’ director dies
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 Wednesday at his home in New York. He was 73.
The cause was complications from esophageal cancer, his publicists confirmed.
After an apprenticeship with the exploitation king Roger Corman, grinding out low-budget, lurid fare with underclothed women, Demme built a genre-crossing career that showcased his versatility.
His portfolio encompassed offbeat bluecollar 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 dysfunctionalfamily 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 he 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 (Hopkins) and best actress (Jodie Foster as an FBI employee).
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. (Demme had his friends Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young contribute songs for the soundtrack; Springsteen won an Oscar for his song, Streets of Philadelphia.)