THERE'S NO GOING BACK

The career of a celebrated American filmmaker.

Like the great German director Wim Wenders, Jonathan Demme (1944-2017) was an eclectic filmmaker who shot documentaries as well as narrative films. He made commercial Hollywood movies, from Married to the Mob to The Silence of the Lambs, but Demme considered documentaries, including Stop Making Sense, his landmark 1984 concert film about the Talking Heads, to be his “solace from his conflicting issues with the film and television industries.” In this admiring biography, Stewart sums up Demme’s life and career, from his early days as a film critic for his college newspaper and a publicity-department dogsbody for Embassy Pictures to a director of the first order. His directing career started when Roger Corman hired him to helm exploitation films such as Caged Heat and Crazy Mama before moving on to more mainstream efforts. Stewart takes a linear approach, chronicling Demme’s upbringing and the passions that motivated his choices, noting that Demme considered himself a “cultural magpie” who “championed stories about strong women and characters who resisted bigotry and racism.” Demme’s successes and frustrations are all here, from “critical arthouse hit” Swimming to Cambodia, a record of monologist Spalding Gray’s one-man show, to his work on 1984’s Swing Shift, an attempt at mainstream appeal that became “one of the most difficult films he would ever direct” and was so painful that he considered giving up filmmaking and opening a bookstore. A deeper analysis of Demme’s themes rather than a chronological presentation of his films would have made this a stronger book. There’s a lot here to entertain fans, however, with enlightening behind-the-scenes stories. For example, when Demme worked in publicity at United Artists in 1968, he was François Truffaut’s New York driver. Truffaut told Demme, an obvious cinephile, that he looked forward to his first film. “I’m not interested in directing,” Demme said, to which the ever-astute Truffaut replied, “Yes, you are.”

A heartfelt appraisal of a cinema iconoclast.