Jonathan Demme
The oldest dated credit on this page has him in front of the camera rather than behind it: in 1977 Demme played Matt Winters in The Incredible Melting Man. Elsewhere in the filmography sit titles like Caged Heat and Crazy Mama, the sort of thing career retrospectives quietly drop. By 1984, with Stop Making Sense, nobody could describe him as a genre hire any more.
What he was actually good at was faces. Demme shot people head-on, close, often looking very nearly down the lens, and he trusted an audience to read a performance without help. It is why the concert film works, why Philadelphia lands, and why the two-hander scenes in The Silence of the Lambs are frightening as conversation rather than as horror staging. He was also unusually loose about tone: Something Wild and Married to the Mob play crime for laughs, and the same director made both of those and Beloved.
The late career is a mixed record. He directed a new version of The Manchurian Candidate in 2004, made a family wedding into a wounded piece of chamber drama with Rachel Getting Married in 2008, kept returning to music with Ricki and the Flash in 2015, and cheerfully took acting bits, including a turn in That Thing You Do! billed as a major motion picture director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director and a Directors Guild award, with nominations from BAFTA, the Golden Globes and three Independent Spirits, a spread that fits a career spanning more than 30 years and 70 productions. He died in 2017.
Movies (24)
- Stop Making Sense (1984)
- Rachel Getting Married (2008)
- Caged Heat (1974)
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
- Philadelphia (1993)
- The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
- That Thing You Do! (1996)
- Married to the Mob (1988)
- The Truth About Charlie (2002)
- Beloved (1998)
- Into the Night (1985)
- Something Wild (1986)
- Ricki and the Flash (2015)
- Subway Stories (1997)
- Swing Shift (1984)
- Citizens Band (1977)
- Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny (2016)
- Last Embrace (1979)
- Last Embrace (1979)
- Corman's World (2011)
- The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
- Crazy Mama (1975)
- Melvin and Howard (1980)
- Hannibal Hopkins & Sir Anthony (2021)
Where to start with Jonathan Demme
Ignore the chronology and put Stop Making Sense on first. It is the cleanest demonstration of what he believed a camera was for: point it at performers, hold, and trust the audience to do the rest. Everything else he made is easier to read once you have seen it.
The Silence of the Lambs is the one you are here for, and it holds up because the scary scenes are two people talking in tight close-up. Philadelphia is more dated and more moving than its reputation allows. For the loose, unpredictable Demme, Something Wild is the essential title and Married to the Mob is the fun one. Rachel Getting Married is the late-period highlight, loose and raw and full of people talking over each other, and Melvin and Howard is the early one worth digging out.