He's back

In his new film, Jonathan Demme returns to his quirky, clear vision of what we hold most dear

Jonathan Demme (on the set of ''Rachel Getting Married'') shot his latest movie with hand-held cameras using only available light and sound. (Bob vergara/courtesy sony pictures classics)

Welcome home, Jonathan Demme. We've missed you.

"Rachel Getting Married" is the 64-year-old director's 22d theatrical release, give or take, and his seventh in a decade. Yet it's the first movie in years to showcase his vision of America as a lovely but fraught emotional playground. Demme didn't go anywhere but his sensibility did, and only with this new work do we realize how unique that sensibility is.

On the surface, "Rachel" shows the filmmaker hopping on any number of trends, current and mildly passé. A comedy-drama set at an upper-middle-class Connecticut wedding, the movie has the acrid confessional subject matter of last year's sound-alike "Margot at the Wedding." Like that film, it features a Hollywood star playing a bad girl: here, Anne Hathaway as a black hole of dysfunction who checks out of rehab to attend her sister's nuptials.

"Rachel" has also been shot with hand-held cameras using only available light and sound; the only music on the soundtrack comes from the wedding musicians. It's Demme's Dogme movie, in other words, loosely made according to the strictures of that notorious Danish arthouse movement and bearing comparison to Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration" (1998).

The comparison only highlights how Demme has turned Dogme to his own ends, though. (Call it Degme. Or maybe Domme.) Warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than damning, "Rachel" is a throwback to the fluky, generous vibe that sustained the di rector's films in the late 1970s and 1980s - "Handle With Care" (1977), "Melvin and Howard" (1980), "Stop Making Sense" (1984), "Something Wild" (1986), and "Married to the Mob" (1988).

Those five films look more and more like classics of their era, dated perhaps in hairstyles and musical choices yet enduringly human. They're dedicated to the proposition that average people live unaverage lives, full of pockets of creativity and rebellion under the guise of just getting along. The CB enthusiasts of "Handle With Care" are a motley crew of mobile Americans playing games of make-believe and persona; in a way, they prefigure all the online Others we now pretend to be. The Melvin of "Melvin and Howard" is a good-hearted loser of a milkman who gives Howard Hughes a lift in the desert one night and is blessed with a windfall no one believes he deserves.

Concert film rather than fiction, "Stop Making Sense" nevertheless has a rich, benign interest in human connection and expression that owes as much to Demme as to David Byrne and Talking Heads. Building and cresting as the band slowly coalesces onstage, the movie's rhythms give the whimsy backbone; the whimsy gives the music depth. Twenty-four years after it came out, it's still one of the great music documentaries.

Released two years later, "Something Wild" is the pinnacle of Demme's early style. Starring Melanie Griffith as an unnerving free spirit in a Louise Brooks bob and Jeff Daniels as her yuppie quarry, the film begins as a spiky goofball comedy-romance, cute enough but razor-sharp around the edges. Halfway through, though, Demme pulls the rug out from under his callow hero and unsuspecting audience: Ray Liotta, brilliantly scary, turns up as Griffith's spurned husband and "Something Wild" pivots gracefully into a thriller about the perils of irresponsibility. Chuck it all and go find America, the movie says, but don't be surprised if America bites back.

It's the grace notes in "Something Wild" that still charm: the walk-through characters who have more humanity than the leads in most other movies. I'm thinking of Steve Scales as a gas station attendant advising Daniels to "attempt to be cool," or Dana Preu as Griffith's mother, an old-fashioned apple pie sort who doesn't miss a thing. Even in the director's next film, the comparatively contrived Mafia comedy "Married to the Mob," plot keeps getting waylaid by the human comedy at its most beguiling. Demme doesn't just like people, he makes you realize how little other filmmakers do.

So what happened? What happened is that he had a hit. A huge one, too: "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) is by common consensus one of the best films of the past quarter century, and it won five Oscars, including best picture and best director.

Was it a Jonathan Demme movie? You could argue that, Anthony Hopkins's contributions aside, no other filmmaker could have created in Hannibal Lecter such a frighteningly recognizable monster. If Demme's skill with the conventions of thrillers seemed a surprise, it shouldn't have: Those who saw his apprentice work for Roger Corman in the early '70s - including "Caged Heat" (1974), both a great women's prison film and a subversive commentary on same - know how good this director is with genre.

Yet "Silence" turned Demme into an "important" filmmaker, and it hardened his artistic arteries. He had tried Hollywood before, to ill effect: "Last Embrace" (1979) was a gluey suspense film, and the WWII romantic drama "Swing Shift" (1984) was notoriously butchered by its studio. Now Demme seemed to monitor himself. "Philadelphia" (1993) is a cautious message movie that could have been made by any reasonably talented studio insider, and "Beloved" (1998) was just bad: white elephant art that showed the director backing away from the darkness at the core of American history. Confronted with the evils of slavery, Demme's humanism turned pedantic and naive.

He still busied himself with documentaries and music projects, and many of these are very good: "Cousin Bobby" (1992), about an Episcopalian priest relation; "The Agronomist" (2003), about a Haitian human rights activist; "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" (2006), a wistful companion piece to "Stop Making Sense." Demme's post-"Beloved" fictional features seemed quixotic at best, though. His remakes of "Charade" (2002's "The Truth About Charlie") and "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) aren't bad movies, but why bother when the originals are so complete on their own?

So "Rachel Getting Married" feels like a reboot, a case of a filmmaker scrubbing his art back down to basics and rediscovering what moves him. And what moves him is people: yelling, embracing, banging their heads against each other in frustration and love. Hathaway's Kym could be cousin to Griffith's damaged Lulu/Audrey from "Something Wild" (even the hair's similar) but now her self-absorption is pared back for everyone but her to see. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet brings the characters - dad Bill Irwin, a golden retriever of an enabler; title bride Rosemarie DeWitt, furious that she always has to be the "normal" sister; mom Debra Winger, a distant mountain of judgment - but Demme's skill with mood and performance brings them to fractured life.

The Whitmanesque vision of an all-encompassing America is there in the no-big-deal multiracial casting, and the fascination with music remains. Many of Demme's rock 'n' roll friends (Robyn Hitchcock, Sister Carol) flit through the movie as hired wedding performers, and the groom is played by Tunde Adebimpe, a member of the band TV on the Radio. (Too bad the Feelies didn't get back together in time.) Young's present, too, if only when Adebimpe sings a startlingly beautiful a cappella version of "Unknown Legend" as his wedding vows.

There are some critics who cringe at that scene, seeing it as evidence of a director unable to let go of his pet rockers. I don't know, maybe they just don't like Neil. It's allowed. From this vantage point, though, Demme's doing what many good artists do, which is channel new content through the filter of abiding interests. One of those interests is optimism - an unfashionable stance, perhaps, but worthy when it's clear-sighted. "Rachel Getting Married" acknowledges great pain but eases it (not all of it but enough) through inclusiveness of race and generations and music and food. The movie's a family reunion of everything Jonathan Demme holds dear.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@boston.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movies.