E-book Evaluation
There’s No Going Again: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme
By David M. StewartUniversity Press of Kentucky: 280 pages, $30If you purchase books linked on our website, The Instances might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist unbiased bookstores.
Earlier than he set his sights on Hollywood, Jonathan Demme studied to develop into a vet.
Motion pictures might have mesmerized him since childhood, however animals had been his “parallel obsession,” writes movie journalist David M. Stewart in “There’s No Going Back,” an uneven biography of the Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Demme, who died in 2017, solid a profession outlined by movies that centered voices from society’s ever-shifting margins. He spotlighted girls (“Swing Shift”), Black individuals (“Beloved”) and HIV-positive homosexual males (“Philadelphia”) in narratives that celebrated their trials via an empathetic digital camera lens. Interspersed amongst Hollywood tasks had been documentaries reminiscent of “The Agronomist,” on Haiti’s solely unbiased radio station; “Right to Return,” about Hurricane Katrina victims combating to entry their houses once more; and “Stop Making Sense.”
(College Press of Kentucky)
Demme himself witnessed the problem these at society’s fringes confronted coming into areas males (typically white) had claimed and refused to relinquish. His grandmother retold rose-tinted tales of constructing plane gear throughout World Struggle II earlier than being forcibly relegated again to her home life. Rising up Miami’s Overtown neighborhood, Demme noticed how Black individuals created their very own distinctive “music and communal energy” throughout segregation, a tradition he would repeatedly honor in his personal movies.
After faculty, Demme landed a publicity job at United Artists. Throughout an opportunity encounter chauffeuring François Truffaut round, the grasp auteur advised the determined factotum that he had an eye fixed for steering. Demme insisted he wasn’t considering being a director, even after the French filmmaker inscribed his copy of “Hitchcock.” “Yes, you are,” was Truffaut’s reply.
Regardless of these early protests, Demme moved west to Hollywood, working for B-movie producer Roger Corman on movies such because the 1971 bike image “Angels Hard as They Come” and the salacious 1973 jail escape story “Black Mama White Mama” earlier than he directed “Caged Heat” with a feminist tackle the women-in-prison movie that embraced satire and progressive politics.
Demme directed socially aware tasks in the course of the Seventies, tackling the disenfranchised and forgotten via motion and comedy tales. “Crazy Mama,” a few housewife intent on exacting vengeance on the lads who murdered her husband, highlighted Demme’s want to acknowledge girls’s ongoing struggles towards a patriarchal world. “Fighting Mad” and “Citizens Band” (subsequently titled “Handle with Care”) touched on company greed, ecological destruction and discovering human connection in small-town America.
“Melvin and Howard” gained two Oscars and was nominated for a 3rd. However in an expertise that will sadly repeat itself, the Goldie Hawn-produced “Swing Shift” was a deeply demoralizing venture for Demme. He had needed to make a “feminist perspective of women during wartime,” writes Stewart, whereas Hawn had imagined the movie as a sugary rom-com. The veto energy Hawn had meant all the ending was reshot, largely sapping Demme’s dream of its political message. A decade later, Demme would undergo related strife on the set of “Beloved,” quarreling with Oprah Winfrey over features of characterization within the supernatural slavery epic. ( Winfrey advised Stewart that she was banned from viewing the dailies for a quick interval.)
However artistic consolation was discovered, as Demme repeated through the years, in music. There was his Speaking Heads live performance movie “Stop Making Sense” and several other Neil Younger live performance movies; “Something Wild,” a Melanie Griffith film he made after “Swing Shift,” prominently featured Jamaican singer Sister Carol and her cowl of “Wild Thing.”
Nonetheless, it was his ardour for feminine protagonists who had been “reliable in a world of lying men” that additionally fueled his output, if solely partly handled in Stewart’s shorthand method. “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Rachel Getting Married” and “Ricki and the Flash” every etched, in equal components, the power and vulnerability of a distinct girls — battling the prison justice system, besieged by dependancy and estranged from household — who reject victimhood as an possibility.
David M. Stewart’s biography of Jonathan Demme stresses it’s not a definitive biography however an effort to “understand Demme as a filmmaker.”
“There’s No Going Back” stresses it’s not a definitive biography however an effort to “understand Demme as a filmmaker.” If Stewart might be forgiven for the sunshine element on Demme’s upbringing for that reason (only some pages), he’s much less absolved for his inconsistent, typically abridged, remedies of Demme’s movies and what messages to glean from an extended view of the director. Patchy approaches — “Rachel Getting Married” will get some dissection with minimal manufacturing element, whereas “The Silence of the Lambs” will get intensive manufacturing element with no movie evaluation — doesn’t assist extract Demme’s thematic throughlines as a filmmaker. To finish the e-book together with his passing and with none closing remarks solely compounds this downside.
What does considerably redeem “There’s No Going Back” is the element given on Demme’s lifelong activism. Beginning first with the liberty of expression motion, Demme moved to documenting Haiti’s transformation from a dictatorship to a democracy in a number of energized documentaries. If political connections aren’t at all times made again to his dramatized movies, appreciating how Demme championed voices from the likes of Haiti and within the aftermath of Katrina does a minimum of spotlight his lifelong advocacy of society’s most forgotten — on- and off-screen.
When Demme was a younger boy, his mom advised him to jot down in regards to the films he so ardently watched “to uncover the secrets behind the magic.” It might be an unlucky irony then that this similar recommendation Stewart recounts proves largely absent in “There’s No Going Back.” Whereas well-intended and admiring, the biography typically proves facile, exhibiting problem reckoning with Demme’s oeuvre and its deeper political and cinematic classes. The e-book has nonetheless set a few of the groundwork for a future venture that will extra adeptly synthesize life with artwork.
Smith is a books and tradition author.
