Le Grand Jerry Lewis
By AGNÈS C. POIRIER
CANNES, France — EVERY year the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival choose to recognize one towering figure in cinema. This year, they are paying homage to Jerry Lewis with a special screening of “Max Rose,” the latest film for the 87-year-old American. In it, he plays an aging jazz pianist.
For 12 days, 20 or so films compete for the Palme d’Or, arguably the greatest accolade in cinema. Roman Polanski, the Coen brothers, Paolo Sorrentino, Steven Soderbergh, Jia Zhangke, François Ozon and James Gray are among this year’s contenders. The festival, which started on Wednesday and ends May 26, won’t give Jerry Lewis a statuette to go home with; it never does, and doesn’t have to. Next Thursday, Cannes will simply reaffirm the genius of Jerry Lewis to the world.
Critics in France have always been infatuated with Mr. Lewis, who has been far less adored in his own country. Funny thing is, the French always seem surprised when it is suggested that their love is not universally shared. “That Americans can’t see Jerry Lewis’s genius is bewildering,” N. T. Binh, a critic for the French film magazine Positif, stuttered last week, as he stood in front of me while waiting to get into the screening of “The Bling Ring,” directed by Sofia Coppola.
Mr. Lewis rose to stardom alongside Dean Martin between 1946 and 1956. In 10 years, they made 17 films together, from “My Friend Irma” to “Hollywood or Bust,” and were the world’s top box office earners. In 1949, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther seemed slightly puzzled by this “new mad comedian,” “his idiocy,” “the harrowing features of his face” and “the squeak of his vocal protestations.” From 1956, Mr. Lewis went solo, writing, directing, acting and producing in a multiyear contract for Paramount and then for Columbia. Among the titles treasured by the French critics were “The Bellboy,” “The Nutty Professor” and “Three on a Couch,” but also later films like Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”
The French passion for Mr. Lewis was even the subject of a book by Rae Beth Gordon, published in 2001 by Stanford University Press and called, naturally, “Why the French Love Jerry Lewis.”
To understand the genius of Mr. Lewis in the eyes of the French, one needs to go back to the infancy of cinema, before World War I. The French were big producers of silent films, most of them comedies.
What the French love in Jerry Lewis, the actor, writer and director, is his multifaceted moi, the meta-narrative and his extreme velocity, as exemplified in French silent films. He took them back to their cinema history.
Think George Méliès and you’ll have understood Mr. Lewis’s enduring appeal with the French. Mr. Méliès, a one-man band to whom Mr. Scorsese dedicated a film in 2011 (“Hugo”) and who liked nothing more than to mutate into new characters, shared with Mr. Lewis a taste for split personalities, otherness and hysteria. In many films, including “The Nutty Professor” and “The Family Jewels,” Mr. Lewis played multiple parts.
In front of a grimacing Lewis, the French feel awe, while Americans are more likely to shift uncomfortably in their seats. The Australian screenwriter Shane Danielsen told me last week in Cannes that “Lewis’s humor — physical, gestural, a kind of exaggerated grotesque — transcends linguistic barriers in the same way as does Buster Keaton.”
Anglophones feel faintly embarrassed by it, I think, because they feel a guilty sense of ownership — and therefore complicity. But for the French, its nonverbal, farceur quality is something they can hook into much more easily than, say, the parched irony of a Bill Murray or the specifically British despair of a Tony Hancock.
Most Americans don’t realize that for the French, Mr. Lewis represents an American archetype, a handsome clown and histrionic child. The American film director Jonathan Nossiter told me, “It’s very comforting for them to believe that an American genius, by necessity, is monstrously puerile in front of the camera and an idiot savant behind it.” Mr. Lewis also offers complexity and powerful combinations of opposites: he is both a child throwing tantrums and an auteur creating a world of his own. He was a handsome man who kept wanting to play the ugly guy, first beside his sidekick Dean Martin, and then afterward in his solo career. He has also been a depressive clown, à la Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati.
Jerry Lewis is an auteur the way François Truffaut defined it. Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, who presides over the selection of films and the choice of homages, told me: “Jerry Lewis invented a singular style, uniquely staged and choreographed. In fact, when America was celebrating the showman, the comedian, France was recognizing the artist with a unique voice and eye.” He was a hysterical and wondrous child that France would have loved to call her own.
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