The Agronomist

IF YOU see a good film correctly," says Jean Dominique, hero of Jonathan Demme's documentary The Agronomist, "the grammar of the film is a political act." This offhand remark isn't just the most important statement in Demme's marvelous new documentary. It is the guiding principle upon which Demme's whole career, including The Agronomist, is founded.

When the slain DJ, Radio Haiti founder and ex-agronomist first made that comment, he was telling his friend Demme about his lifelong love of movies. That love enabled Dominique to meet his wife, fellow movie buff, DJ and activist Michele Montas and led Dominique to found Haiti's most prominent film society, which introduced Haitian buffs to the likes of The Third Man and La Strada. The point of the cinema club wasn't to escape through film (though members surely did that). The point was to think about what each movie said about life and how it said it, then apply those observations to daily existence in Haiti. Although The Agronomist doesn't come right out and say so, Demme pointedly suggests that the Cinema Club taught Dominique how to be Dominique.

Dominique did not go on the air each day and denounce government departments or officials, because if he did, the government would have retaliated even more swiftly and viciously than they did. (Dominique was a hated foe of Haitian strongmen, including Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier.) Instead, Dominique talked in very general terms about freedom, a topic of great interest in Haiti, a former slave colony that kicked out its French masters, only to be treated as a bastard stepchild by a U.S. government that often intervened in Haitian life both militarily and economically. Dominique also gave listeners straightforward but (ahem) interesting news about political resistance to U.S.-backed dictators in Latin America.

Dominique's sideways approach to political agitation didn't inoculate him against government anger. His radio station was regularly harassed. At one point, soldiers barged into Radio Haiti, shot up equipment and imprisoned and tortured staffers. (Dominique left the microphones on so listeners could hear the whole thing.) He was forced into exile twice in the 80s and 90s but he still inspired millions to contemplate something better than life under dictatorship.

In a thematic trope far more inventive than anything in Bertolucci's babyboomer nostalgia-fest The Dreamers, Demme implies that Dominique developed his style by watching movies. By studying key works of American and world cinema, he realized that one could learn to make statements without seeming to make statements. For example, neither The Third Man nor La Strada could be called explicitly political, in the Costa-Gavras/Oliver Stone way that the word is often used. Yet it should still be hard for any reasonably alert moviegoer to watch The Third Man, released in 1949, without thinking about how brazenly its tale of disillusionment, deception and black market commerce contradicts the triumphalist cheer of WW2's victors. It should be similarly hard to gaze upon the fairytale wasteland of La Strada, with its cast of hearty but damaged entertainers and peasants, and not think of the damage inflicted on Italy by fascism and war.

Dominique's cinema club was banned by the Haitian government when it got a little too clever and showed Alain Resnais' Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, which contained footage of Auschwitz that reminded Haitian viewers of Fort Dimanche, the prison where government enemies were tortured. But by then, Dominique was already thinking like a movie hero-a gentle-souled, under-the-radar hero; the kind of guy Jonathan Demme might have made a fictional film about.

From the time its format developed in 1968, Radio Haiti's mix of music, hard news and populist feeling was beloved by Haitian citizens, and their affection might have prevented the station's immediate closure by the series of dictatorships that Dominique and his friends opposed. At one point, government thugs tried to starve Radio Haiti by warning advertisers not to buy time; as if learning from Dominique's example, listeners rebelled without quite rebelling, by donating their cars for use as taxis and giving the revenue to the station. When Dominique's exile ended, thousands of people turned out to greet him. In video footage of his return, Dominique seems stunned to realize the extent of Haiti's love for him.

The Agronomist isn't a groundbreaking work of nonfiction cinema. It contains no unusual techniques except for Demme's trademark, even cliched closeups where subjects appear to stare directly into the camera. (Did Demme lift this device from Errol Morris, or the other way around?) But it's still a terrific movie. Every shot is functional, provocative or both. The film's modesty is a source of its power. I don't think it should be considered a minor work, much less a documentary curiosity from a director who usually works in fiction (Stop Making Sense and Swimming to Cambodia notwithstanding). Quite the contrary: its style and substance reminded me of why I liked Demme in the first place.

The film's soundtrack of Haitian pop and original Wyclef Jean tunes illustrates that country's cultural influence as surely as Demme's account of the United States intervention in Haitian politics should inspire, shall we say, a somewhat closer reading of the news accounts. Like Dominique, Demme is being political without being obviously, stridently political. (He tips his hand only during the first appearance of ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest whose arrival in the narrative is signaled by heavenly choir music.) Overall, the attitude is not politically correct or left-wing-but humane. Demme is anti-violence and anti-oppression, a point-of-view that's less fashionable around the world than many Americans think.

Since the massive success of The Silence of the Lambs, Demme's fiction film output has strained toward social significance and masterwork status. Beloved was an esthetically fierce but abstract, bloated and unfocused slavery fable; like Toni Morrison's novel, it won respect but not much love. Demme's sweetly didactic, anti-homophobia Philadelphia was the Gentleman's Agreement of its time-and an act of atonement for Silence, a thriller with a pre-op transsexual butchering women for their skins. The unnecessary remake The Truth About Charlie was clearly a lark. But it still felt like a Demme film, notably in its funky editing, salt-and-pepper romantic casting and groovy liberal, One-World-jukebox soundtrack-qualities Demme showcased in Stop Making Sense, Something Wild and Married to the Mob.

The universal appeal of The Agronomist reminds one that while Demme typically works with white leads, his multicultural approach to casting and music was (and remains) ahead of Hollywood's curve. I have a bad feeling about Demme's coming version of The Manchurian Candidate-talk about unnecessary remakes!-but I admit to being intrigued by two things: the casting of Denzel Washington in a role first played by Frank Sinatra, and the original novel's source material, which was political in a general sense such that both liberals and conservatives had reason to feel both vindicated and mocked.

CLOSE YOUR EYES Based on Madison Smartt Bell's novel Doctor Sleep, Close Your Eyes is a thriller in the Dead Again/Blink/The Cell mode, which is another way of saying that it cloaks fantasy ridiculousness in the mantle of scientific speculation and medical practice. Goran Visnjic stars as the hero, displaced foreigner turned London hypnotherapist Michael Strother, who has opened up a clinic to help people quit smoking. One of his patients is a hardboiled policewoman (Shirley Henderson) who is stunned to realize that Strother can see into her hypnotic dreams. Perhaps he can help treat a little girl who's been mute since barely escaping the clutches of a serial killer?

It's all convoluted and rather dumb, of course, and Henderson is distractingly eccentric. But husky-voiced Croatian Visnjic, who's only 31, has grownup movie star appeal-none of that Tom Cruise man-boy posturing for him. And director/co-writer Willing proves himself an assured filmmaker who has the Coens' knack for playful yet mathematically exact compositions. Past, present, reality and dream bleed into each other throughout, yet Willing manages the transitions in hard cuts and manages to surprise us without confusing us. There's a jigsaw-puzzle logic to the film's visuals that's far more precise and sophisticated than this material warrants. This is an okay movie with great stuff in it.