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 christopher funderburg ~

Demme’s 1988 comedy Married to the Mob tracks the miserable widow of a recently iced gangster as she absconds from a life of cold comfort on Long Island to an uncertain existence on Manhattan’s wild Lower East Side - and more than any of his films, it’s a statement of values for Demme: Michelle Pfeiffer’s Angela de Marco wants to escape the murder and adultery and having a home furnished exclusively with things that “fell off of a truck,” sure, but even more than that she wants to escape sofas with plastic covered seat cushions, laser tag ambushes, hairspray and spray-tan. Her biggest conflict with Dean Stockwell’s Tony “The Tiger” Russo might not even be that he’s a sleazy mob kingpin who murdered her husband but that his idea of a catchy tune is the Burger World Town jingle.

After she settles into an apartment with a bathtub smack in the middle of its cramped kitchen, in her words she’s “not even thinking about a guy,” but ends up falling for Matthew Modine’s straight-laced FBI man nonetheless. She doesn’t need an Alec Baldwin-handsome mook packing a cucumber under his Armani suit and she certainly doesn’t need a state-of-the-art garish yellow fridge in a big bow from her dangerously married mafioso suitor; what she needs (no, what she wants) is a super-square. A big ol’ good-hearted dork. A guy who earnestly (with a hint of confusion) answers her question of “You aren’t married or nothing like that, are you?” with “If I were married how could I accept your invitation to a date?” A guy who knows about dinosaurs.*

When she stops by the apartment of undercover FBI agent “Mike Smith” to ask him out on a date, her son tromps up and interrupts their conversation with a question about if the cavemen killed off the dinosaurs. She’s embarrassed, “That’s a little before my time.” Will the fact that she’s a single mother scare him off? No, he’s as interested in talking about dinosaurs as the kid is. Demme’s genius reveals itself in the details and the scene where she falls for him but hard has the confluence of weird particulars that often came together in Demme’s best work: Angela sports a t-shirt featuring a picture of a T-rex in a beanie, her son is inexplicably dressed in a fuzzy blue caveman costume, Modine offers thoughtful and detailed explanation of time as a “24 hour day” in which the dinosaurs would’ve only existed in the final hour and cavemen in the final two seconds.

It goes without saying that Mike won’t ever get murdered in the arms of his two-timing mistress in the Pantheon Room of the pay-by-the-hour Fantasia Motel. But a Lower East Side guy who loves kids and cavemen and dinosaur beanie t-shirts? A guy who wants to go out dancing to samba music then kick back on the couch and listen to the Q Lazzarus record while giving you a foot massage? That’s the kind of guy just right for the life Angela and Demme wanted.