Alan Parker: 1944-2020 | Tributes

For his next two projects, Parker adapted a couple of novels, though once again, they could not have been more dissimilar in story or tone. “Birdy” (1984) was based on the 1978 William Wharton novel about the long-running friendship between two teenaged boys, one, Al (Nicolas Cage) brimming with self-confidence and the other, Birdy (Matthew Modine), shy, withdrawn, obsessed with birds and convinced he can fly. Wharton’s narrative was not particularly cinematic—most of the story was anchored in the mind of Birdy, whose emotional traumas have left him mute—but Parker wisely put the focus on the strong performances by Cage and Modine. The film is a stirring experience that, while a commercial flop, is worthy of rediscovery. 

“Angel Heart,” by comparison, was a looney and lurid '50s-set horror/noir hybrid in which a New York detective (Mickey Rourke at his grubbiest) is hired by a mysterious man (Robert De Niro, doing a wicked parody of Martin Scorsese) to track down a man named Johnny Favorite. The investigation takes him down to New Orleans and involves him in a series of bloody killings before arriving at one of the silliest conclusions you will ever see. Before that finale, however, the film is a brilliant exercise in pure style. Although there was much controversy at the time of its release thanks to a bloody sex scene involving Lisa Bonet, then at the height of her stardom on “The Cosby Show,” the film was not a hit, though it would soon become a cult classic.

Parker’s next two films dealt with shameful examples of 20th century American history. First up was “Mississippi Burning,” a loose interpretation of the investigation of the murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964, in which the case in investigated and cracked by a couple of visiting FBI agents, a good-ol-boy type played by Gene Hackman and a by-the-book type played by Willem Dafoe. Although the performances by Hackman and Frances McDormand, as the terrified wife of a local Klan member, are good, they cannot overcome the grotesque and at time obscene distortion of the historical record presented here. (Coretta Scott King, NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks and the relatives of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner all protested the film.) Inevitably, it was a hit and earned seven Oscar nominations, including nods for Hackman, McDormand and Parker. By comparison, his next film, “Come See the Paradise” (1990), was a braver and less garish historical drama, showing how Japanese-Americans were treated in the United States in the wake of Pearl Harbor as they were stripped of civil liberties and placed in internment camps. 

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