With the Carter administration deep in its socially-crippling inflationary spike and Reagan’s middle-America dreamland still 18 months off, Jonathon Demme’s 1980 calling-card film Melvin and Howard captured both the fantasy and the reality of the Great American Dream to startling effect.
Paul Le Mat is Melvin Dummar, a drifting beacon of Mid-west optimism who has pinned his hopes on having his song, 'Santas Souped-up Sleigh’, become a hit. On a late-night drive, he stumbles across a dishevelled old man (Jason Robards) just off a desert track. While driving him to Las Vegas, an instant rapport is formed - the scenes shared in the truck that establish the bond between these men represent a near-perfect blend of dialogue and character. The old man claims to be Howard Hughes, which Melvin dismisses as loon-talk, and soon they part.
The film from that point succinctly follows the occasional-ups and significant-downs that Melvin experiences. Though he has a beautiful wife (a radiant and brave Mary Steenburgen) and loving, tolerant daughter (Elizabeth Cheshire), his inability to forego his dreams and accept responsibility damns their life together. Le Mat, resembling a pudgy, shorter Warren Beatty and exuding an immense likeability, keeps us sympathetic to Melvin’s plight – a decent man who believes in all that America promised him but one who is just a little too dim to understand things don’t always work out as Uncle Sam promises.
The most incredible part of this true story is the impact this simple man with over-simplistic yearnings had on the billionaire that achieved all the American Dream represents. In others\' hands, the message of the denouement would be maudlin, syrupy, sentimental. Jonathon Demme honours the purity and subtlety in Bo Goldman’s Oscar-winning script with an assuredness that signified a major director had arrived.
A lacklustre box office run meant this film isn’t always spoken of when great American films of the period are mentioned, but it’s a sly, sweet, timeless fable of considerably more note than it’s ever been afforded.
