“Stop Making Sense” (1984)
Everything novel becomes old given enough time, but it’s a testament to the iconoclasm and shock-of-the-new impact of Demme’s brilliant Talking Heads concert doc “Stop Making Sense” that after three decades, it hasn’t dated, but rather become a landmark in the redefinition of an often-undervalued genre. Instead of the shaggy self-aggrandizement of the standard ’70s concert documentary, which could easily become the visual equivalent of self-indulgent prog-rock, Demme approached his film as less a fan of the personalities involved and more an admirer of performance, as well as, obviously, a devotee of the music. His stroke of inspiration was simple: there should be nothing keeping the viewer from the experience of that live performance. So there’s no preamble, and no epilogue, no interviews and no supplemental material that would not have been available to the people really there. And even more unusually, he got rid almost entirely of reaction shots of the audience, also framing them out wherever possible, and even kept the onstage pyrotechnics to an absolute minimum: everything’s painted black, the lighting setup is spare, and even the costumes, save for David Byrne‘s inexplicable and brilliant Big Suit™, are the soul of unshowiness. The approach is almost ascetic, but the result is anything but: embodying a seamless fluidity between shots and an understanding of musical rhythm in the edit, “Stop Making Sense” is not just compelling and clever, but utterly joyous. A great deal of that is, of course, down to the uncategorizable brilliance of the band, and to Byrne’s charisma (and his spasmodic, gangling-marionette style of dance). But it’s the clarity of Demme’s approach, and the fact that he innately knows what an audience member would be looking at at any one time and directs his camera accordingly, that gets you over the “I wish I were there!” feel of so many performance docs, and makes you feel like you actually were.
“Handle With Care” (1977)
Imagine “Convoy” if directed by Robert Altman and populated with a rather B-ish cast of character actors and future TV players. But then infuse it all with a sincere, if cock-eyed, affection for the ramshackle community it portrays, and you might end up somewhere near “Handle With Care” (aka “Citizen’s Band“), Demme’s fourth feature film and, amateurish though it is compared with the polish he’d soon achieve, the first real indication of the filmmaker he’d become. It’s a palimpsest of tangentially interconnected stories in small-town 1970s America: pre-Internet, pre-cellphone, when, for a brief moment, CB radio filled the need (and exposed the same divides) that social networking does now, albeit on a more local, less global scale. Spider (Paul Le Mat) is an avid CB-er and do-gooder citizen, using his radio to scan for, and respond to, emergencies such as that which besets bigamist trucker Chrome Angel (the first appearance of Demme talisman Charles Napier) when he is distracted by the sexy talk going on over the airwaves between Electra (Candy Clark) and Warlock (Will Seltzer) and drives his truck off the road. The film then shifts between storylines as Chrome Angel’s two wives turn up and discover his deceit, Spider goes on a vigilante spree to clear the emergency band of hobbyists and discovers that his ex-fiancé is seeing his brother (Bruce McGill), and Spider’s irascible aging father (Roberts Blossom) goes missing. The sprawling cast means characterization is necessarily limited, but already Demme’s eye for a skewering detail is in evidence. Anyway, this isn’t really an exercise in character, but a fond, offbeat portrait of a community formed less by geography than shared interest. And it makes for a fascinating exercise now to observe just how much of the trolling, tedium and confrontation that we associate with online life actually existed before the Internet.
“Rachel Getting Married” (2008)
“I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom for the evening,” announces Kym (Anne Hathaway) as part of her toast at her sister Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding, and unconventional though the salutation may be, it’s completely honest. Demme’s scabrous, raw and revealing “Rachel Getting Married” showcases his gift for empathy, but here it’s stripped of any sentimentality at all and sharpened to an edge so keen you could cut yourself on it. This is embodied especially in Hathaway’s Oscar-nominated, exposed-nerve performance (and every time we’re reminded she actually won for “Les Misérables,” we like to pretend that that’s simply the fairly appropriate French title for this film), as the upstaging asshole addict just out of rehab whose self-centered co-opting of Rachel’s wedding sparks off a series of increasingly dramatic and involved family revelations. DeWitt is terrific too, as are Debra Winger and Bill Irwin in support, but the film’s peculiar incisiveness exists in the unbroken line of communication that seems to exist between Demme and Hathaway’s Kym, as though observing her unsparingly from all sides is both the most truthful and most painful thing he can do with this impossible character. But then Demme built his career on shifting the focus of attention away from where it might naturally gravitate (this is not a film about Rachel getting married at all) and onto a character or a situation that would usually seem fit to be a marginal presence at best. And as so often before — like when he focused not on famous eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, but on ordinary nobody Melvin Dummar; or when he made a rookie FBI agent the equal of a cannibalistic serial killer in terms of psychological richness — the quality of Demme’s steadfast, uncondescending attention to peripheral people suggests a humanity that underpins even this, the most acidic of his films.
“Philadelphia” (1993)
Demme’s Oscar-winning, Bruce Springsteen-soundtracked AIDS drama has for a long time now been kind of the poster child for the middlebrow, mainstream social-issues movie — with all the soft-peddling and well-intentioned sentimentality that implies. But while many of the attitudes and misconceptions it dramatizes have thankfully changed over the intervening years, “Philadelphia,” as a film, is surprisingly resilient and effective if you revisit it today, further removed from the heat of an AIDS panic that made it seem both too unsubtle in its agenda and yet not hard-hitting enough in 1993. In retrospect, too, it’s easy to forget that the central role’s “Oscar bait” potential was by no means assured back then — in fact, Tom Hanks‘ win for playing a gay character dying of the disease and fighting to his last breath for compensation for unfair dismissal from his job was probably the chief factor in identifying such roles as potential awards magnets. Back then, it was simply a brave choice, and Hanks is really impressive, committing to the physical demands of the role and withstanding the film’s many lingering close-ups at a time in his career when he easily could have continued as America’s Sweetheart: Boy Edition (“Sleepless In Seattle” came out the same year). But gay rights and AIDS paranoia are not the only hot topics that “Philadelphia” essays — in Denzel Washington‘s character, the lawyer whose homophobia and AIDS-related ignorance is gradually eroded, Demme also introduced a racial subtext, as well as getting these two intensely well-matched stars together onscreen for the first and, strangely, only time so far. As compromised as the final film’s stance might feel, there is a genuinely well-motivated subversion going on in giving the audiences of the early ’90s one of two surrogates to identify with: a (perhaps too saintly) gay man dying of a stigmatized disease or a prejudiced black man forced to face, and then expand, the limits of his own empathy.
