Philadelphia Weekly

There's a scene early on in Beautiful Girls, Ted Demme's inexplicably overlooked 1996 sweetheart of a picture, during which a bar full of half-plastered friends spontaneously erupts in a sing-along to "Sweet Caroline" that's no less heartfelt for being so wildly out of tune.

It probably would have been easy for the sequence to curdle into cheap humiliation, but there's a friendly, understated fondness in Demme's staging that makes it feel more like an invitation to the party. It's one of those wonderfully intimate, strangely poignant movie moments where you glimpse a filmmaker falling madly in love with his characters--and the feeling is contagious. Good times never seemed so good.

When he died last week at 37 from an apparent heart attack while playing basketball, Ted Demme was hardly in any danger of becoming a household name. Though he was shooting major studio films before his 30th birthday, Demme had skillfully avoided any of the "hot young filmmaker" hype that so often capsizes promising careers. His pictures were never hits, but more often the kind of movies you accidentally discover on your own and can't wait to tell your friends about the next day.

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Demme's career began at MTV. After starting out as a production assistant, he eventually created Yo! MTV Raps and somehow got it on the air back when the channel's programming lineup was whiter than Ben Affleck's capped teeth. Music videos (like Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia," which Demme co-directed with his famous uncle, Jonathan) and episodic television gigs (including Homicide: Life on the Street and Robert Altman's short-lived TV series Gun) followed, as well as the feature film Who's the Man? starring Yo! MTV Raps hosts Dr. Dre (no, the other one) and Ed Lover.

It was during this time that Ted Demme directed Denis Leary's seminal one-man show, No Cure for Cancer. The show, which remains the funniest hour and a half of uncut vitriol to emerge from the 1990s, was the beginning of a longtime creative partnership that led to the best work of both men's careers.

The Ref (1994) made about 15 bucks during its initial release, but this caustically hilarious lump of Christmas coal ultimately found an appreciative audience on home video. In his first leading role, Leary stars as an irritable burglar who makes the mistake of trying to hold hostage a soon-to-be-divorced couple, venomously played by Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.

Little does Leary know he's arrived just in time for a holiday dinner from hell, with a gaggle of vicious relatives on the way to partake of a gourmet feast of bitter, snickering resentment. I've never been able to figure out how Demme was able to sneak such a sophisticated work of quicksilver wit past his producer, Jerry Bruckheimer. (But then again, Mr. Pearl Harbor might just be to blame for The Ref 's re-shot, emotionally dishonest epilogue.)

It's a shame that Demme and Leary's masterwork was so barely seen. The dark, despairing Monument Ave. (1998) unflinchingly strips bare the underbelly of Beautiful Girls' adorable, beer-swilling Peter Pans. Despite being small-time crooks in their mid-30s, these irresponsible thugs still live with their mothers and face all the complexities of the modern age with a playground slaughter-rule mentality.

Trouble arises when Leary's Bobby O'Grady starts to exhibit faint glimmers of adulthood, and his dearly held code of clannish neighborhood law caves in on him with bloody, devastating consequences. Leary's performance is one for the books, despicably hateful yet undeniably vulnerable. Even more astonishing is Demme's unobtrusive direction, which eloquently places these dead-end lives in clear perspective while stubbornly refusing to deny them their humanity.

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Demme's last two pictures--the confused Eddie Murphy prison comedy Life and last year's unfairly maligned dope epic Blow (also produced by Leary)--were his most commercially successful, but also his most inconsistent. He appeared to be working through a transitional phase, trying to harness his uncanny knack for low-key intimacy and graft it onto a grander, more sprawling canvas. You could see him deliberately changing up his inconspicuous directorial style in Blow's constant Scorsese goofs, grasping at a visual identity to call his own in amid a sea of countless homages.

Both films still have plenty of elements worth recommending (Life might be the closest we'll ever come to that great dramatic performance we all know Eddie Murphy's got in him) yet at the end of the day, feel vaguely incomplete. But as always with Ted Demme pictures, there's still a deeply felt core of empathy, and the best moments are the quietest ones.