Film Freak Central

Swimming to Cambodia (1987) - DVD

****/**** Image C Sound C Extras B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw I learned about memoir as art watching Spalding Gray in Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia. Although I was a freshman in college when I first saw it, I'm not sure that I ever really knew what "memoir" was before, and, since, I've been hard pressed to find any examples that measure up to the bar it sets. Swimming to Cambodia also provides an impossible standard for direction, as Demme takes Gray's "monolog" format (essentially him, alone, on a stage) and turns it into something like an expressionistic piece, something that is at once inside Gray's mind and inside yours using thoughtful editing choices and clever sound and lighting design. In a year that saw the release of Predator, Full Metal Jacket, The Untouchables, Empire of the Sun, Raising Arizona, Near Dark, A Better Tomorrow II, Angel Heart, Evil Dead II, and RoboCop, it's a little astonishing to realize the best-directed film is this one with a guy sitting at a table. For what it's worth, as I was writing my own memoir of a very particular moment in my life, the only readership I really imagined for it consisted of my father and Gray--Gray, who killed himself over water in 2004, and my father, who died a year before that. If the one was the reason, the other was the way.

Stop Making Sense (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By "empty stage," I don't mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space--it's basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead--with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, and maybe more to the point, an audition. And by "close-up," I don't mean a tight shot on the man's face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities--white shoes, white pants--in a SteadiCam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, "I have a tape I want to play." If you know the Talking Heads, you'll recognize this immediately as David Byrne's shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band--as it was for teenaged me--there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. "What's up with this fucking twerp," I remember thinking, "and his art-damaged affectations?" I quickly learned the joke was on me.

Dan in Real Life (2008) + Rachel Getting Married (2008) - Blu-ray Discs

DAN IN REAL LIFE
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges
directed by Peter Hedges

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw The Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen, if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction, down to ankle-deep--we're talking primordial muck--with Dan in Real Life. That last one, from Pieces of April perpetrator Peter Hedges, squanders an unusual amount of currency in Steve Carell (at his melancholic zenith), pairing him with Juliette Binoche in a bittersweet romantic imbroglio that absolutely does not deserve the happy horseshit ending slathered on it to apologize for its occasional poignancy. It's not that I enjoy being sad, it's that I enjoy getting a condescending handjob even less. I'm willing to forgive the bad slapstick of a group-aerobics session, the casting of Dane Cook, and the set-up/knock-down mentality of it that in fairness mars more honest films like Rachel Getting Married, too. The picture begins in the title's "real life," only to sail away to a privileged, impossible Rhode Island wonderland that may as well be the setting of every Nicholas Sparks book ever written and to-be-written. It's a movie that makes you feel good, like a barium enema, or Rolfing. What I'm saying is that a lot of things make you feel good in a dumb, animal way--not a lot of them are also art.

John Adams (2008) + Jimmy Carter Man from Plains (2007) - DVDs

JOHN ADAMS
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
"Join or Die," "Independence," "Don't Tread on Me," "Reunion," "Unite or Die," "Unnecessary War," "Peacefield"

JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Ian Pugh It's hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper's epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm's length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it's not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington--who looks as if he's leapt out of a Stuart painting--crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. "Bed, both'a ya!" Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.

TIFF '08: Rachel Getting Married

**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwin
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis's 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of/obligations in his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my heart sank a little when I saw that Declan Quinn, collaborating with Demme for the first time outside the documentary realm, had replaced the man who's photographed almost every one of Demme's fiction features to date, Tak Fujimoto, though I imagine the almost-painterly Fujimoto would have resisted Rachel Getting Married's Dogmé-influenced shooting style. Out on a weekend-pass from rehab, goth-y, parasitic Kim (Anne Hathaway, mannered and overmatched) returns home to disturb the shit before her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) marries African-American fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, of TV on the Radio) and these long day's journeys into night are no longer viable. Unfortunately, the picture insists on pathologizing all the withering remarks and squirmy frankness via a Tragic Family Secret, making a kneejerk transition in the process from a caustic embarrassment comedy tempered by the director's trademark folksiness to a simply embarrassing melodrama for which a devout humanist like Demme seems overqualified. While I can't deny that Rachel Getting Married has some lovely grace notes in its plodding second half (see: a family tradition of competitive dish-stacking), it definitively jumps the shark with a wedding sequence (surely the most protracted since The Deer Hunter's) in which the film regains its comic footing in the worst way: because it's like a MAD MAGAZINE parody of a Jonathan Demme ceremony, complete with Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock performing, the groom inexplicably serenading his bride with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," and Roger Corman in attendance. Sometimes it sucks to be an auteurist, but what can you do? PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)

***½/****
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Not long after the death of his dementia-stricken father and in the four days preceding an operation to fix a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, Young recorded "Prairie Road", then called Jonathan Demme post-operation to say that he was taking some time off and interested in making a movie. Demme's best film is still a tossup between Swimming to Cambodia and Stop Making Sense--his forays into mainstream filmmaking (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) tending towards exactly the kind of slick populism his documents of performance pieces never seem to. His latest, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, is a return to form for a filmmaker who might be our best chronicler of the glorious syncopations of rhythm and flow: a deft, evocative film that finds new poignancy in Young's voluminous back catalogue while allowing cuts from "Prairie Wind" the kind of metaphysical room its title promises.

The Agronomist (2004) - DVD

***½/**** Image B- Sound B
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Reminding a great deal of his remarkable Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme's now-inspiring, now-shattering The Agronomist is another portrait of a doomed storyteller embellished with subtle audio cues and almost mnemonic camera movements--the stamps of a gifted filmmaker who may never be better than when he works with the stuff of real life. Demme is a superior anthropologist and only a so-so fabulist, his liquid cool visual acuity always second-fiddle, after all, to his gift for background flavour, i.e., the contextualizing power of the right music, the right settings, and the right personalities in supporting roles. Demme's films are each documents of the underneath that find explication in hindsight in his apprenticeship underneath Roger Corman while simultaneously explaining how quickly his auteur identity and better judgment can be subsumed beneath too much legacy (The Truth About Charlie) or too devouring an ego (Oprah's The Beloved)--making his upcoming remake of John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate an iffy proposition at best. Demme is himself forever just a step away from his vivid gallery of outcasts and iconoclasts.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Kimberly Elise
screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Walter Chaw Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate is arguably more of a retelling of William Cameron Menzies's Invaders from Mars (1953) than it is of John Frankenheimer's incomparable 1962 original. Like Menzies's science-fiction B-movie classic, the premise of Demme's updating is that some alien force (Earthling mad scientist in this instance instead of Martian) has implanted a small device in certain respected members of our society in order to manipulate them into harming our surprisingly fragile good old American value system. Also like Invaders from Mars, the whole film moves with the logic of a fever dream, all intense close-ups, hallucinatory visions, and suggestions of going underground.

TIFF '03: The Agronomist

**½/****
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme alternates between fiction and documentary filmmaking, a practice that has gone curiously unheralded for an Academy Award-winning director of both mainstream and cult repute. If The Agronomist is any indication of what to expect from Demme's Cousin Bobby or Storefront Hitchcock, to name two of his earlier documentaries thus far unseen by yours truly, I can see why his studio features garner all the attention: though a committed work (Demme began tracking the exploits of his subject, slain Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, as far back as the late-Eighties), The Agronomist is amateurish bordering on sloppy, overreliant on newsroom-font intertitles as a way of not only conveying research but also patching together a chronology for newcomers to the seismic shifts in Haiti's inscrutable political climate. Additionally, however good his intentions, Demme had an obligation to lay into Dominique a little for his repeated self-exiles to New York City whenever the Haitian people needed his outspoken, progressive voice the most: he seems to count Dominique's founding of Haiti's first film club (which provides ample opportunity for cheesy inserts of classic one-sheets) as a pre-emptive bid for redemption. Still, their kinship, if you will, is not without avail: Demme's window into Dominique through this shared love of movies humanizes the latter in a way a standard piece of reportage might not, and The Agronomist's ending is appropriately cinematic in its bittersweet uplift. I suspect the next step is a biopic, which, if produced in America, will surely omit Demme's shrewd criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. Programme: National Cinema Spotlight