Canadian Academy Award winning director Norman Jewison wears a Canadian Film Centre cap as he arrives at a luncheon at the residence of the Consul General of Canada in Los Angeles, California February 22, 2008.Fred Prouser/Reuters
There is a strong case to be made that Norman Jewison was the most important Canadian filmmaker to never make Canadian films.
A child of Toronto but a creature of Hollywood, Jewison, who died Saturday at the age of 97, built his directorial career outside his beloved home country from almost the very beginning. A stint at the BBC in London turned into a few years at the CBC, which led to gigs inside American network television, which in turn allowed him to wriggle himself inside, and then more or less conquer, the studio system.
Did Jewison consider himself “Canadian” as he made every kind of film under the L.A. sun? In 24 features produced across five rollicking decades of industry excess, was there some kind of homegrown thread that could connect everything from a fizzy heist flick (1968′s The Thomas Crown Affair) to go-for-broke musicals (1971′s Fiddler on the Roof, 1973′s Jesus Christ Superstar) to a stirring legal drama (1979′s ... And Justice for All) to a screwball rom-com (1987′s Moonstruck)?
Perhaps the answer can be found in Jewison’s intense commitment to social justice – his unshakable belief that filmmaking not only had the power but also the duty to change the way that we see our world, and each other. That is as admirably progressive a Canadian value as anything, and can be felt powering Jewison’s most searing productions, including 1967′s In the Heat of the Night, 1984′s A Soldier’s Story, 1999′s The Hurricane, and even, in its own way, his wild 1966 farce The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming!
But despite setting one film in Montreal (1985′s Jane Fonda convent drama Agnes of God) and half of another in Toronto (The Hurricane), Jewison never made the Great Canadian Film. Not that he didn’t want to.
“I wish I could have made a statement about Canada vs. the U.S., and Canada vs. the rest of the world. I would have loved to do it. But I never found a story that I believed I could make into an exciting motion picture,” Jewison told The Globe and Mail in 2016. “If you set out to make a big statement about Canada, you’re going to fail!”
While Canadian filmmakers – both Jewison’s contemporaries and those who followed him decades afterward – might disagree with such a statement, one thing becomes clear when considering the director’s improbable, eclectic and essential canon: Norman Jewison never, ever wanted to fail. While he may have stumbled here and there, disaster was flirted with more than tolerated. If there is one through-line to Jewison’s films, it is the fierce commitment to the belief that a good story told in a highly entertaining fashion – slick, precise, sincere – is the very best way to win hearts and minds. Give it your all, and audiences will respond in kind.
Obituary: Norman Jewison, our man in Hollywood
Sometimes this worked out better in theory than practice – few contemporary moviegoers will find much to revisit in 1982′s Best Friends, 1994′s Only You or 1996′s Bogus – but when Jewison was able to line up his passions and resources just so, it resulted in a kind of beautiful cinematic alchemy. He wrung tremendous performances from Hollywood legends (Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier, Al Pacino), uncovered new layers in superstars who audiences thought they already knew inside out (Cher), minted new stars (Nicolas Cage, Denzel Washington), and made it all seem so deceptively easy.
Even Jewison’s missteps contained such endlessly fascinating elements – the distressingly prescient corporate satire of Rollerball, the labour politics of F.I.S.T., the lingering political ambiguity of what would be his final film, The Statement – that they all demand attention and reassessment. Jewison was a relentlessly committed craftsman who worked in the service of the audience. He was Canada’s ultimate showman, even if he didn’t believe he could ever show Canada to the rest of the world.
Not to say that Jewison ever forgot where he came from, either. As founder of the Canadian Film Centre, a charitable organization that has helped train 1,900-plus filmmakers, writers and performers since its inception in 1988, Jewison played an integral role in building up this country’s screens sector. It was a community that Jewison himself never relied upon to build his own career – but only because it was a community that simply did not exist at the time.
And what is more Canadian than helping others, even if you were never given the same opportunity yourself?