Michael Lehmann is most interesting when comedy turns on how people behave in groups. We value his work with ensembles, but the uneven features make us cautious about choosing a film on his name alone.
Fi1m perspective
In The West Wing (1999), people take their work seriously and still manage to be funny. Michael Lehmann directed Five Votes Down, contributing to a programme whose cast can make an earnest speech worth hearing. We like that balance, and his interest in the absurd ways people behave together gives us a reason to follow his work. The feature films are too uneven to make the director's name a reliable recommendation by itself.
His debut, Heathers (1989), took aim at high-school cliques and the teen films that sentimentalised them. Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters thought John Hughes's films made school look too happy and sentimental, a specific complaint that gave the satire somewhere to start. Hudson Hawk (1991), an action-comedy with Bruce Willis, moved into larger studio filmmaking with less assured results. The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) took a lighter romantic-comedy route. These changes of subject and tone make it difficult to treat the debut as a promise of what every subsequent film would be.
Television became his main work from the mid-1990s, with directing credits across comedy, drama and horror-tinged series. His work includes The Larry Sanders Show and multiple episodes of True Blood (2008), alongside The West Wing. That is a useful spread of experience for someone comfortable with ensembles and shifts between the serious and the ridiculous. We would be wary, though, of finding the same dark satirist behind every one of these programmes.
We were moved by The West Wing's earnest speeches because the actors made the seriousness feel human, even when the writing was pleased with itself. Lehmann has described the early work there as creatively free and the cast as a pleasure to direct. His account fits what works in the programme, though an episodic directing credit cannot earn him all the credit for its warmth or humour. The dialogue's occasional self-congratulation remains a reason for caution, rather than a reason to stay away. Start with Heathers for the darker comedy; choose The West Wing when the ensemble is the attraction.
Biography
Michael Lehmann is an American film and television director. Born in San Francisco in 1957, he graduated from Columbia University in 1978 and from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1985. His early industry work included answering phones at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope and supervising cameras on films such as The Outsiders (1983).
Lehmann's feature directorial debut was the black comedy Heathers (1989). He went on to direct films including Hudson Hawk (1991), The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) and 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002).
On television he has directed episodes of The West Wing (1999), The Larry Sanders Show, True Blood, Californication, American Horror Story and Dexter, among many others.
