Last week, our long-time professional acquaintance Jonathan Demme passed away. Not only was he one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation, he was a genuinely good person who seemed to be adored by everyone he came into contact with (a quality even rarer than filmmaking genius.)

In The New Yorker magazine, Terrence Rafferty wrote of him, "Of the major American directors, he's the least erratic, the most consistently good company, because he has interests rather than obsessions" - Demme joins a lineage of auteurs like Jean Renoir & Louis Malle defined not by their stylstic grip or devotion to a genre, but by their warm humanism; filmmakers whose deep compassion and boundless curosity on the subject of humanity were their essential characteristics.

All week long we'll be paying tribute to Demme by remembering some of our favorite scenes, characters and moments from his body of work.

{the DEMME TRIBUTE index}

~ by john cribbs ~

I've never been impressed by the excessive frills and furbelows of big event weddings. I got hitched in some stranger's living room, for christ's sake. As such, I never understood why the marriage ceremonies in The Godfather or The Deer Hunter are considered such iconic scenes by so many. For me, the greatest wedding ever captured on film is the remarriage of Melvin Dummar and Lynda West Dummar at the Cupid Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. It happens in a film called Melvin and Howard, but anyone who's seen the movie knows it's really the story of Melvin and Lynda: the opportunities they make for themselves, the doors that open for them, others that slam shut in their faces - most often slammed by Melvin himself. He makes a lot of bad decisions, and getting back together with the woman who ran away with their daughter Darcy, forcing him to serve divorce papers at the sleazy strip club where she's working, could very well be one of them. Everything about the second wedding - Melvin's impulsive proposal over the phone, Lynda being very pregnant (possibly with another man's baby) and putting on the wedding gown in the stall of a gas station bathroom (with Darcy telling her she looks "Fat, but nice"), the almost unaffordable $39 service, the old man who suffers a coronary after Lynda kisses him - is the opposite of romantic.

So how the hell did Jonathan Demme make it so goddamn romantic? He doesn't give the audience any indication that the union is going to last this time. The look Melvin and Lynda give each other when they disagree on the song that will play them to the wobbly altar is even mirrored later in the film in a look between Melvin and an audience member after they each shout out a different choice for the gate to Easy $treet (the audience member choosing the same gate Lynda ultimately picks).

But for Demme, there's no correct answer. "Because" or "Hawaiian War Chant," Gate #2 or Gate #3, they're all paths the characters forge for themselves. Sometimes you hit the rolling thunder. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you jump the waterhole on your dirtbike and make it. Sometimes you don't. Most likely, you're not going to get 1/16th of the Howard Hughes fortune - that's not the point. The point is, do you help out an old man in the desert? Do you get on stage and sing your misappropriated country song about driving a faulty milk truck? Do you take this man, do you take this woman? Demme found a way to empathize with every character in his films by following their decisions - skipping out on a lunch bill, breaking away from the mob, accepting a role in The Killing Field - with the full conviction that these decisions, right or wrong, are going to define them. They are always made without any kind of ceremony, and they are always romantic.

As for big, elaborate nuptials featuring young lovers with an actual chance in hell of staying together - well, Demme ended up making them look romantic too, years later in my second favorite of his films, Rachel Getting Married. But even the sweetest moments of that film can't compare to Melvin and Lynda serving as kissing witnesses for other couples for the remainder of their wedding day to cover their expenses. Those other couples are their own story. The clerk is her own story. Hal, the man standing creepily in the background of the chapel (Demme regular Hal Marshall, who appeared in bit parts in Caged Heat and Crazy Mama) is his own story. These characters are united in the certainty of their actions and the faith in their ambitions. The magic of believing.