It is one thing, as a documentarian, to approach a project with a proportional sense of the personal in contrast to the informative. It is something else entirely to inject oneself into an exploration of the film’s subject, as director Mark Cousins does in The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. The filmmaker was obviously quite affected by what he discovered about the eponymous man, a film producer whose renown within the industry has come from his refusal to be predictable in choosing the projects he was to get behind. Jeremy Thomas’ filmography has an amusingly all-over-the-place quality to it, but as the man himself says (and the titles themselves support his statement), he is drawn to films that are bold, original and provocative in some way.
We gain very little insight into his career before becoming a producer through Recorded Picture Company, a production company based out of Britain, the country where Thomas was born in July 1949. His early works included films for directors Jerzy Skolimowski, Nicolas Roeg, and Nagisa Ōshima. One trend that arrives is a devotion to provocative subject matter, from a graphic brutalization and murder in Roeg’s 1983 gold-rush film Eureka to the equally graphic sexual content in David Cronenberg’s Crash and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Cousins leads us on this tour through the producer’s filmography, but there’s no other content during this long stretch.
The audience simply receives a bit of insight into why Thomas is so drawn to this kind of subject matter, and then Cousins repeats that point over and over, until a dull repetition develops. Yes, it’s nice that we are treated to footage of movies, some of which are now nearly impossible to find. In one example, the infamously cursed The Brave, directed by and starring Johnny Depp, receives a brief moment in the sun – only for the surrounding context to a momentary reminiscence on Thomas’ part for working with star Marlon Brando. The entire movie is like this, with Cousins coaxing banal observations out of his subject and never managing to go deeper on any of them.
The closest the film comes to finding some understanding of the man is his fairly baffling reaction to having won an Oscar. That was for The Last Emperor, another collaboration with Bertolucci, which swept the 60th Academy Awards in 1988 and gave Thomas’ career something of a boost. It’s not quite clear what Thomas himself thinks of that accomplishment beyond the fact that he then received a bit more attention from the film community at large. The problem is that Thomas never digs deeper into this idea, instead simply switching to another milestone or shifting another goalpost of sorts.
The most fatal decision made by Cousins here, though, was to write and record his own running narration, since the result has a navel-gazing effect that turns a film presumably about Jeremy Thomas into a film about Cousins’ ideas about who the man is. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, then, is an act of frustrating evasion as a documentary, because here we have a theoretically interesting subject at the mercy of a director who cannot get out of his own way. It’s an impenetrable cycle of whispered, adoring narration and the opposite of any kind of probing analysis we might want instead.
Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group
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