- Something Wild
In this week’s issue, J.R. Jones reviewed A Master Builder, the new movie by Jonathan Demme. Pauline Kael once wrote that “you have to feel your way through” a Demme movie, and that’s true. Visually, his films are rather plain, but they’re deceptively impressionistic, specifically in the way they evoke the emotions of their characters via competent and intentionally austere composition and staging. With Demme, he’s most profound when he’s at his least stylish, an intriguing paradox that occasionally results in some unremarkable films (Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate). His work focuses on people and relationships in highly specific ways, and his ability to so gracefully express his characters’ inner lives puts him in the same league as great humanist filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Hal Ashby. My five favorite Demme films are below.
- Citizens Band [aka Handle with Care] (1977) In this curious and prescient comedy, his first truly great work, Demme borrowed Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village and applied it to the hyperspecific milieu of a small Nebraska town caught up in a CB-radio craze. The film toes a tricky line between humanist parable and didactic cautionary tale—with similar material, a lesser director might resort to ridicule and judgement, but Demme grants his bucolic characters their due dignity. The film has remarkable staying power, growing more and more profound as mobile communication becomes increasingly ubiquitous, and the lyrical denouement remains one of the director’s most inspired sequences.
