Review: ‘The Storms of Jeremy Thomas’ captures a film producer’s iconoclasm

The job of film producer has always been notoriously hard to define because it can be so many different things: creative coach, finance manager, general facilitator, problem solver. The new documentary “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas,” directed by Mark Cousins, looks at the career of the adventurous British producer Jeremy Thomas and basically answers “all of the above.” At one point in the film, Thomas himself describes producing as “putting together people, ideas and money.”

More discursive than comprehensive, the film does seem to capture Thomas’ fierce, swashbuckling spirit. Tilda Swinton and Debra Winger are the only past collaborators interviewed for the film and Swinton is, unsurprisingly, deeply insightful and poetic in describing Thomas’ working methods. She places him in line with the “wayward Englishness” of such figures as painters J.M.W Turner and Francis Bacon, authors Virginia Woolf and William Blake and punk impresario Malcolm McLaren. Swinton sums up Thomas’ ethos as “a duty to go there.”

And gone there he has, as a producer of provocative, boundary-breaking films for decades, having won the Oscar for best picture for director Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” in 1988. Thomas had long-running, multi-film relationships with Bertolucci, Nicolas Roeg and David Cronenberg among others, while also producing early works by Stephen Frears, Jonathan Glazer and many more.

Thomas, who has long attended the Cannes Film Festival, prefers to drive himself from England to the South of France for the event. So the film is structured around Thomas and Cousins making the trip together ahead of the 2019 festival, with Cousins continuing to shadow Thomas once they are there.

The film’s wittiest touch may be that whenever a movie clip is used, along with the title, year and director, the onscreen credit notes the number of the film it is among Thomas’ work, like an opus number. So “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” is No. 5, “Bad Timing” is No. 3, “The Last Emperor” is No. 10, “Crash” is No. 17 and “First Love” is No. 68. This highlights the breadth of Thomas’ work and also its sheer impressive volume.

There are avenues left unexplored or unexplained that might have been covered by a more conventionally structured film. Cousins has very much made the profile he wanted to about Thomas, down to the “storms” metaphor of the title that Cousins keeps mentioning without ever quite fully getting across. Considering that no one else is likely to make a feature-length portrait of Thomas, it is regretful that this one doesn’t feel more definitive.