University Press of Kentucky: 280 pages, $30
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Before he set his sights on Hollywood, Jonathan Demme studied to become a vet.<\/p>\n
Movies may have mesmerized him since childhood, but animals were his \u201cparallel obsession,\u201d writes film journalist David M. Stewart in \u201cThere\u2019s No Going Back,\u201d an uneven biography of the Oscar-winning director of \u201cThe Silence of the Lambs.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, chemistry classes proved too hard, and only one animal sustained Demme\u2019s interest long enough: the Alligator, the University of Florida newspaper that let him contribute film reviews. A career as a veterinarian was abandoned in favor of the movies. <\/p>\n
Demme, who died in 2017, forged a career defined by films that centered voices from society\u2019s ever-shifting margins. He spotlighted women (\u201cSwing Shift\u201d), Black people (\u201cBeloved\u201d) and HIV-positive gay men (\u201cPhiladelphia\u201d) in narratives that celebrated their trials through an empathetic camera lens. Interspersed among Hollywood projects were documentaries such as \u201cThe Agronomist,\u201d on Haiti\u2019s only independent radio station; \u201cRight to Return,\u201d about Hurricane Katrina victims fighting to access their homes again; and \u201cStop Making Sense.\u201d <\/p>\n
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(University Press of Kentucky)<\/p>\n
Demme himself witnessed the difficulty those at society\u2019s fringes faced entering spaces men (often white) had claimed and refused to relinquish. His grandmother retold rose-tinted stories of building aircraft equipment during World War II before being forcibly relegated back to her domestic life. Growing up Miami\u2019s Overtown neighborhood, Demme saw how Black people created their own unique \u201cmusic and communal energy\u201d during segregation, a culture he would repeatedly honor in his own films.<\/p>\n
After college, Demme landed a publicity job at United Artists. During a chance encounter chauffeuring Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut around, the master auteur told the desperate factotum that he had an eye for directing. Demme insisted he wasn\u2019t interested in being a director, even after the French filmmaker inscribed his copy of \u201cHitchcock.\u201d \u201cYes, you are,\u201d was Truffaut\u2019s reply.<\/p>\n
Despite these early protests, Demme moved west to Hollywood, working for B-movie producer Roger Corman on films such as the 1971 bike picture \u201cAngels Hard as They Come\u201d and the salacious 1973 prison escape story \u201cBlack Mama White Mama\u201d before he directed \u201cCaged Heat\u201d with a feminist take on the women-in-prison film that embraced satire and progressive politics.<\/p>\n
Demme directed socially conscious projects during the 1970s, tackling the disenfranchised and forgotten through action and comedy tales. \u201cCrazy Mama,\u201d about a housewife intent on exacting vengeance on the men who murdered her husband, highlighted Demme\u2019s desire to recognize women\u2019s ongoing struggles against a patriarchal world. \u201cFighting Mad\u201d and \u201cCitizens Band\u201d (subsequently titled \u201cHandle with Care\u201d) touched on corporate greed, ecological destruction and finding human connection in small-town America.<\/p>\n
\u201cMelvin and Howard\u201d won two Oscars and was nominated for a third. But in an experience that would unfortunately repeat itself, the Goldie Hawn-produced \u201cSwing Shift\u201d was a deeply demoralizing project for Demme. He had wanted to make a \u201cfeminist perspective of women during wartime,\u201d writes Stewart, while Hawn had imagined the film as a sugary rom-com. The veto power Hawn had meant the entire ending was reshot, mostly sapping Demme\u2019s dream of its political message. A decade later, Demme would suffer similar strife on the set of \u201cBeloved,\u201d quarreling with Oprah Winfrey over aspects of characterization in the supernatural slavery epic. ( Winfrey told Stewart that she was banned from viewing the dailies for a brief period.) <\/p>\n
But creative comfort was found, as Demme repeated over the years, in music. There was his Talking Heads concert film \u201cStop Making Sense\u201d and several Neil Young concert films; \u201cSomething Wild,\u201d a Melanie Griffith movie he made after \u201cSwing Shift,\u201d prominently featured Jamaican singer Sister Carol and her cover of \u201cWild Thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, it was his passion for female protagonists who were \u201creliable in a world of lying men\u201d that also fueled his output, if only partly dealt with in Stewart\u2019s shorthand approach. \u201cThe Silence of the Lambs,\u201d \u201cRachel Getting Married\u201d and \u201cRicki and the Flash\u201d each etched, in equal parts, the strength and vulnerability of a different women \u2014 battling the criminal justice system, besieged by addiction and estranged from family \u2014 who reject victimhood as an option. <\/p>\n
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David M. Stewart\u2019s biography of Jonathan Demme stresses it\u2019s not a definitive biography but an effort to \u201cunderstand Demme as a filmmaker.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s No Going Back\u201d stresses it\u2019s not a definitive biography but an effort to \u201cunderstand Demme as a filmmaker.\u201d If Stewart can be forgiven for the light detail on Demme\u2019s upbringing for this reason (only a few pages), he is less absolved for his inconsistent, often abridged, treatments of Demme\u2019s films and what messages to glean from a long view of the director. Patchy approaches \u2014 \u201cRachel Getting Married\u201d gets some dissection with minimal production detail, while \u201cThe Silence of the Lambs\u201d gets extensive production detail with no film analysis \u2014 doesn\u2019t help extract Demme\u2019s thematic throughlines as a filmmaker. To end the book with his passing and without any final remarks only compounds this problem.<\/p>\n
What does somewhat redeem \u201cThere\u2019s No Going Back\u201d is the detail given on Demme\u2019s lifelong activism. Starting first with the freedom of expression movement, Demme moved to documenting Haiti\u2019s transformation from a dictatorship to a democracy in several energized documentaries. If political connections aren\u2019t always made back to his dramatized films, appreciating how Demme championed voices from the likes of Haiti and in the aftermath of Katrina does at least highlight his lifelong advocacy of society\u2019s most forgotten \u2014 on- and off-screen.<\/p>\n
When Demme was a young boy, his mother told him to write about the movies he so ardently watched \u201cto uncover the secrets behind the magic.\u201d It may be an unfortunate irony then that this same advice Stewart recounts proves largely absent in \u201cThere\u2019s No Going Back.\u201d While well-intended and admiring, the biography often proves facile, showing difficulty reckoning with Demme\u2019s oeuvre and its deeper political and cinematic lessons. The book has still set some of the groundwork for a future project that may more adeptly synthesize life with art. <\/p>\n
Smith is a books and culture writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review There\u2019s No Going Back: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme By David M. StewartUniversity Press…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,9186,75,1554,19980,19977,9713,19976,19981,14830,7980,208,19978,7460,8443,19979,6771],"class_list":["post-24639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-director","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-french-filmmaker","tag-haiti","tag-hollywood","tag-jonathan-demme","tag-lambs","tag-movie","tag-oprah-winfrey","tag-review","tag-silence","tag-society","tag-stewart","tag-swing-shift","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}