DEMME LOVE? OUGHT TO

The masterly Jonathan Demme has departed, at 73.

His last fiction feature, 2015’s Ricki and the Flash, was a misfire, alas, but here in the Valley, Harkins Theatres hosts a well-deserved retrospective tribute this week, featuring four of the best of Demme’s direct, humane, sophisticated yet accessible films: His classic thriller Silence of the Lambs (1991), his fine courtroom drama Philadelphia (1993), his brilliant, genre-bending comedy-melodrama Something Wild (1986) and my own favorite, Married to the Mob (1988).

If you’ve never seen this buoyantly nutty comedy, in which the Long Island mob widow Angela de Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) tries to “divorce” herself and her son from her extended gangster “family,” I highly recommend. It features a terrific cast led by Dean Stockwell (who got an Oscar nomination) as the smitten boss Tony “The Tiger” Russo, Matthew Modine as Pfeiffer’s G-man love interest, the young Alec Baldwin as Frankie “The Cucumber” de Marco, and the marvelous Mercedes Ruehl as Tony’s heartbroken and hilariously terrifying wife Connie. It also features what I think is Pfeiffer’s best, or at least most endearing, performance.

O RICKI, WHAT A PITY

Opening this weekend: 

 
Ricki and the Flash—Meryl Streep has been a favorite of mine since, if memory serves, the second movie I ever reviewed, The Seduction of Joe Tynan back in 1979. If I recall, I referred to her as a “brilliant newcomer”; a nervy line from a seventeen-year-old, but I wasn’t wrong. Much as I loved her work back in those accent du jour days, however, I love her even more now—she's lightened up, and loosened up, and her performances are genuinely fun.

I also love Jonathan Demme, and I’ve missed him. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s he turned out a bunch of sophisticated yet unpretentious, entirely accessible classics and near-classics, like Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he hasn’t made anything anywhere near that level in years.

And I have a high regard for Diablo Cody, who crafted the snappy but heartfelt dialogue for Juno back in 2007. For that matter, I love Kevin Kline.

Which is why it pains me to report that the collaboration of all of the above, Ricki and the Flash, despite plenty of good work, is a miss, and not even a near-miss.

Streep plays Ricki, who abandoned her upper-middle-class Indiana family decades earlier to follow her rock star dreams in California. She had one failed album, and now she and The Flash serve as the house cover band at a bar in Tarzana, where they often outnumber their fans. Her lead guitarist (Rick Springfield, who looks agreeably a bit Kris Kristofferson-ish with middle age) is also her main squeeze, though she holds him at arm’s length emotionally.

Her patient, recessive ex (Kline), who long since remarried a supermom (Audra McDonald), has made peace with Ricki, but her three grown kids still resent her, at different levels of bitterness. Ricki gets a call from the ex that their daughter (Mamie Gummer) has been dumped by her husband and is in bad shape. When Ricki gets to Indianapolis, she finds that this was an understatement.

Nothing terribly wrong with any of this, on paper, and there are many sharp, funny passages of dialogue and lively little episodes. Cody has a way of departing from the standard movie-character playbook—Ricki, for instance, is one of those Tea Partiers who turn up at times in fields where you wouldn’t expect them. She makes sour cracks about Obama from the stage, voted twice for George W. Bush, and even has a Gadsden Flag tattooed on her back.

As always with Demme, the settings ring with authenticity and there are terrific touches of atmosphere. But there’s a slackness to the pacing and a sloppiness to the transitions that keep the movie from adding up, somehow, either as drama or as comedy.

Or, I’m afraid, as a jukebox musical, either. Streep is a fine musical talent—she handled the folk numbers in Altman’s Prairie Home Companion and the show tunes in Into the Woods with authority and wit. But the classic rock in Ricki and the Flash just isn’t a good fit for her voice and performing style, and Demme saddles her with several full numbers. I don’t wish to be ungallant, but let’s just say that it’s not terribly surprising that Ricki’s album wasn’t a success.

About the best thing I can say for Ricki and the Flash is that it doesn’t punish us too much. The movie climaxes at a wedding. I knew there were going to be toasts and speeches and awkward encounters, and I tensed up, remembering Demme’s 2008 Rachel Getting Married. But Demme and Cody give us a break—they don’t seem determined to make us miserable. Ricki’s gesture at the wedding is borderline inappropriate yet nonetheless lovely, and it ends the film on a pleasant note. But it’s faint praise when the best feeling a movie gives you is relief at what it didn’t do.

HEADIN' OUT TO EDEN...

RIP to the reliable, high-testosterone character actor Charles Napier, departed at 75. The Platonic ideal of the term “lantern-jawed,” Napier appeared in Russ Meyer flicks & as scowling heavies on TV & in films like The Blues Brothers & Rambo, but got to show his versatility as a fixture in many Jonathan Demme movies, including Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Philadelphia & perhaps most memorably as the Tennessee Corrections Officer that Hannibal Lecter gets the better of in Silence of the Lambs.

But I’ll always have a soft spot for Napier's guest shot on Star Trek, as Adam, the cheeriest of the space hippies in the notorious third-season episode “The Way to Eden”:

Listen to him singing “Yea Brother” (rather well) here.

OF GLEE THEY SING

All I know first-hand about Glee! the TV series, other than that it’s wildly popular, is what I’ve gleaned from the parts I’ve seen of two or three episodes. I liked what I saw, more or less—the eclecticism of the musical choices & the goofy overproduction of the numbers, the sweet exuberance of the young performers, the good values didactically delivered, and the even-toned comic villainy of Jane Lynch as a bracing counterbalance to the show’s self-conscious virtuousness.

But I’m sure that there’s plenty I didn’t “get” about Glee! The 3D Concert Movie, opening today. Directed by Kevin Tancharoen, this documentary chronicles a New Jersey stop on last summer’s concert tour by the show’s cast, remaining nominally in character while they perform dorky-but-rousing versions of pop favorites, scavenged from sources ranging from Britney Spears to the Beatles to Streisand, and performed in idiosyncratic arrangements.

Most of the performers seem like they’re trying a little too hard, in the Star Search/Up With People mode, but that has its own charm, within limits; it’s as if they’re auditioning for the right to go on living. One of them, Lea Michele, takes this to another level: She’s such a merciless crowd-pleaser that you may feel like somebody’s picked her up by the ankles and is swinging her at you like a club.

That said, I enjoyed a lot of these numbers. My favorite, I think, was Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” bellowed by a group of young pretty-boys in traditional glee-club jackets. The incongruity between the costumes & the lyrics was strong showmanship.

Between songs, Tancharoen cuts to talking-head interviews with giddy Glee! fans outside the venue, naming their favorite character, or asserting what an unstoppable universal force for good the show is. There are also a few extended documentary sequences about fans struggling with “being different,” like a midget cheerleader in Yuba City, California, a girl with Asperger Syndrome, a gay teenage boy who was outed to the classmate on whom he had a crush. This stuff is interesting, at times harrowing—any of these strands could probably make a full-length documentary by itself.

Like most concert movies—Jonathan Demme’s great Stop Making Sense is one of the very few exceptions—Glee! The 3D Concert Movie seemed a little too long to me, & it’s a bit self-congratulatory, too. But I can’t deny that a good chunk of it made me smile & tap my foot. The 3D, by the way, is a gratuitous drag as usual—the only really amusing effects are some computer-animated fruit smoothies spilling at us during the closing credits, to the tune of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”