‘There’s No Going Back’ review: Uneven Jonathan Demme biography

Before he set his sights on Hollywood, Jonathan Demme studied to become a vet.

Movies may have mesmerized him since childhood, but animals were his “parallel obsession,” writes film journalist David M. Stewart in “There’s No Going Back,” an uneven biography of the Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs.”

In the end, chemistry classes proved too hard, and only one animal sustained Demme’s interest long enough: the Alligator, the University of Florida newspaper that let him contribute film reviews. A career as a veterinarian was abandoned in favor of the movies.

Demme, who died in 2017, forged a career defined by films that centered voices from society’s ever-shifting margins. He spotlighted women (“Swing Shift”), Black people (“Beloved”) and HIV-positive gay men (“Philadelphia”) in narratives that celebrated their trials through an empathetic camera lens. Interspersed among Hollywood projects were documentaries such as “The Agronomist,” on Haiti’s only independent radio station; “Right to Return,” about Hurricane Katrina victims fighting to access their homes again; and “Stop Making Sense.”

Demme himself witnessed the difficulty those at society’s fringes faced entering spaces men (often white) had claimed and refused to relinquish. His grandmother retold rose-tinted stories of building aircraft equipment during World War II before being forcibly relegated back to her domestic life. Growing up Miami’s Overtown neighborhood, Demme saw how Black people created their own unique “music and communal energy” during segregation, a culture he would repeatedly honor in his own films.

After college, Demme landed a publicity job at United Artists. During a chance encounter chauffeuring François Truffaut around, the master auteur told the desperate factotum that he had an eye for directing. Demme insisted he wasn’t interested in being a director, even after the French filmmaker inscribed his copy of “Hitchcock.” “Yes, you are,” was Truffaut’s reply.

Despite these early protests, Demme moved west to Hollywood, working for B-movie producer Roger Corman on films such as the 1971 bike picture “Angels Hard as They Come” and the salacious 1973 prison escape story “Black Mama White Mama” before he directed “Caged Heat” with a feminist take on the women-in-prison film that embraced satire and progressive politics.

Demme directed socially conscious projects during the 1970s, tackling the disenfranchised and forgotten through action and comedy tales. “Crazy Mama,” about a housewife intent on exacting vengeance on the men who murdered her husband, highlighted Demme’s desire to recognize women’s ongoing struggles against a patriarchal world. “Fighting Mad” and “Citizens Band” (subsequently titled “Handle with Care”) touched on corporate greed, ecological destruction and finding human connection in small-town America.

“Melvin and Howard” won two Oscars and was nominated for a third. But in an experience that would unfortunately repeat itself, the Goldie Hawn-produced “Swing Shift” was a deeply demoralizing project for Demme. He had wanted to make a “feminist perspective of women during wartime,” writes Stewart, while Hawn had imagined the film as a sugary rom-com. The veto power Hawn had meant the entire ending was reshot, mostly sapping Demme’s dream of its political message. A decade later, Demme would suffer similar strife on the set of “Beloved,” quarreling with Oprah Winfrey over aspects of characterization in the supernatural slavery epic. ( Winfrey told Stewart that she was banned from viewing the dailies for a brief period.)

But creative comfort was found, as Demme repeated over the years, in music. There was his Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense” and several Neil Young concert films; “Something Wild,” a Melanie Griffith movie he made after “Swing Shift,” prominently featured Jamaican singer Sister Carol and her cover of “Wild Thing.”

Still, it was his passion for female protagonists who were “reliable in a world of lying men” that also fueled his output, if only partly dealt with in Stewart’s shorthand approach. “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Rachel Getting Married” and “Ricki and the Flash” each etched, in equal parts, the strength and vulnerability of a different women — battling the criminal justice system, besieged by addiction and estranged from family — who reject victimhood as an option.

David M. Stewart’s biography of Jonathan Demme stresses it’s not a definitive biography but an effort to “understand Demme as a filmmaker.”

“There’s No Going Back” stresses it’s not a definitive biography but an effort to “understand Demme as a filmmaker.” If Stewart can be forgiven for the light detail on Demme’s upbringing for this reason (only a few pages), he is less absolved for his inconsistent, often abridged, treatments of Demme’s films and what messages to glean from a long view of the director. Patchy approaches — “Rachel Getting Married” gets some dissection with minimal production detail, while “The Silence of the Lambs” gets extensive production detail with no film analysis — doesn’t help extract Demme’s thematic throughlines as a filmmaker. To end the book with his passing and without any final remarks only compounds this problem.

What does somewhat redeem “There’s No Going Back” is the detail given on Demme’s lifelong activism. Starting first with the freedom of expression movement, Demme moved to documenting Haiti’s transformation from a dictatorship to a democracy in several energized documentaries. If political connections aren’t always made back to his dramatized films, appreciating how Demme championed voices from the likes of Haiti and in the aftermath of Katrina does at least highlight his lifelong advocacy of society’s most forgotten — on- and off-screen.

When Demme was a young boy, his mother told him to write about the movies he so ardently watched “to uncover the secrets behind the magic.” It may be an unfortunate irony then that this same advice Stewart recounts proves largely absent in “There’s No Going Back.” While well-intended and admiring, the biography often proves facile, showing difficulty reckoning with Demme’s oeuvre and its deeper political and cinematic lessons. The book has still set some of the groundwork for a future project that may more adeptly synthesize life with art.

Smith is a books and culture writer.