Tag: biopic

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I Saw The Light

The Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light looks and feels like a movie that was scrapped halfway through shooting but cobbled together anyway, awkwardly, with many key and climactic moments left out. To patch all the disparate bits together, director Marc Abraham inserts aged, black-and-white footage of Bradley Whitford as the enormous and all-knowing head of music publisher Fred Rose, who appears on screen anytime somebody needs to explain what the hell’s going on or why anybody might care.

Instead of creating a sense of authenticity, indiscriminate use of documentary-style interviews makes the whole enterprise seem that much more insincere. One wonders if Whitford will eventually lead the cast in a rousing chorus of the “Time Warp.”

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in I Saw the Light

The Hank Williams story is one part Amadeus and two parts Sid and Nancy. Here was a young, uncontrollable brat with a touch of genius whose genre-defying songs threatened a carefully maintained hierarchy in country and pop that ruffled more feathers from Nashville to New York than all the troubled hillbilly’s missed tour dates combined. There’s the obsessive, endlessly destructive marriage to his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), who was determined to become a celebrity in her own right. All of that potential drama is left on the table in favor of softer, more sympathetic characterizations, and a complete rejection of the idea that, in order for the light to matter, things need to get pretty damn dark.

I Saw the Light chooses to turn Hank Williams’ life story into an old fashioned disease-of-the-week movie, with loving shots of Cherry Jones as Hank’s ma giving Scarlet Witch some stinky side-eye.

The saddest part of all this is that Tom Hiddleston’s acting chops are considerable. Loki may be a little stiff when he’s singing and swinging, but he’s an impressive shape-shifter and a fair vocal mimic.

For all of its landscape shots, I Saw the Light has no sense of place, and even less sense of purpose. Alabama could be Shreveport, could be Nashville, it’s all the same. But what’s most fascinating about the way I Saw the Light fails, is the way it decisively treats Williams’ music — from process to performance — as a tertiary concern. Musicians like Ray Price (Von Lewis) and Faron Young (Fred Parker Jr.) are introduced to the story line but never explained, and, aside from a handful of Hiddleston performances, no attention is paid to the changing sounds of postwar country music, the people who listened to it, or the people who profited from it. The guy had some hits, but what about all of the terrible back pain he suffered? And the drinking problem! Those ill-defined mommy/wifey issues? Without the music, no amount of talking head inserts can explain why we should care.

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Race

The 2016 Olympics in Rio will mark the 80th anniversary of Jesse Owens’ historic wins at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler meant for the games to provide proof of his racial theories of Aryan dominance, but instead, Owens set world record after world record and showed the world that racial harmony is possible by befriending his German rival Carl “Luz” Long.

I’m a self-described Olympic geek, and it’s stories like Owens’ that are the reason why I find the games so compelling in ways that most professional sports leave me cold. At their best, the games celebrate our common humanity and suggest sportsmanship still has its place, and not all competitors have to be motivated by demonizing their opponents. That’s why Hitler’s racial attitudes were so counter to the Olympic ideals, and Owens’ triumph so profound. That Owens did it while facing down similar toxic philosophy back home in the United States only speaks to the strength of his character, and helped many white Americans take the first steps away from notions of racial supremacy.

Jason Sudeikis (left) and Stephan James finish strong in Stephen Hopkins’ triumphant biopic Race.

Race, director Stephen Hopkins’ biopic of Owens, traces the track star’s critical years as a freshman at Ohio State, where he first turned heads by winning four gold medals at the national NCAA Championships the first year he competed. Casting former teen TV star Stephan James as Owens was one of Hopkins’ best choices. James reportedly stepped in after John Boyega dropped out of the production in favor of playing Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’m sure Boyega would have done a good job, but James grabs the baton and runs with it, capturing Owens’ inherent kindness and the stoicism that got him through pressures that would have crushed most men. In the crucial, movie-defining scene where he first steps onto the Olympiastadion Berlin field to face a crowd of 100,000, he seems to physically shrink for a moment before gathering himself up and striding into battle. Hopkins not only has the physicality to portray Owens, but also the timing and chemistry to keep up with former SNLer Jason Sudeikis, who plays Larry Snyder, the Ohio State coach who recognized Owens’ once-in-a-generation talent and taught him the technique to achieve his potential. Sudeikis plays Snyder as a hard-boozing, boisterous man obsessed with track-and-field dominance because he is haunted by the sense that he missed his shot at Olympic immortality. Like Snyder did for Owens, Sudeikis does for Hopkins in their scenes together, pulling him out of his shell and challenging him into greater performance.

Stephan James as Jesse Owens

The sources I consulted listed Race‘s budget at $5 million, but that seems like a lowball considering all of the period production design on display. Like Straight Outta Compton, director Hopkins plays it straight, favoring well-executed but conventional images over any sort of psychological impressionism. When the movie concentrates on the Owens/Snyder story of the struggle for athletic excellence, it soars. But it gets bogged down in some unnecessary digressions, such as the story of the Nazis’ favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s (Carice van Houten) struggle to make Olympia, her documentary about the games. But at least that subplot gives us opportunity to see Danish actor Barnaby Metschurat’s ice-cold portrayal of Joseph Goebbels.

Race‘s biggest weakness is its editing, which is often jittery and unsure when it needs to be steady and clear. I guess it’s supposed to be a modernist stylistic choice when it takes five cuts to show Snyder pour a single shot of whiskey from a bottle, but it made me want to scream, “Pick a shot and stick with it! There are Nazis to triumph over!” If this job has taught me anything, it’s that a movie doesn’t have to be perfect to be emotionally effective, and ultimately, Hopkins and Sudeikis carry the day, with a little help from the heroic story of the World’s Fastest Man.

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Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson’s rise to the heights of musical genius and subsequent fall into the depths of psychosis has been ripe for a biopic for years. The transatlantic rivalry between the Beatles and the Beach Boys that pushed both bands into new creative territory is one of rock music’s greatest myths. The Fab Four’s 1965 record Rubber Soul inspired Wilson to push his studio work further with 1966’s Pet Sounds, which in turn inspired the Beatles to rip up the rule book for 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wilson’s rejoinder was to have been an album called Smile that, Beach Boys partisans claim, would have been the greatest rock album of all time. But Wilson had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the Smile recording sessions and the rest of the band, led by Mike Love, wrested musical control away from him, ceding the field to the Liverpudlians and dooming the American band to decades of formulaic surf nostalgia.

Director Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy gives myth the film treatment it deserves, not by creating an epic clash of musical titans, but by concentrating on Brian Wilson’s point of view. Pohlad is a veteran producer whose filmography includes Brokeback Mountain, The Tree of Life, and 12 Years a Slave, so he understood that the relatively small-scale and built-in audience allowed him to take creative chances. His experiments pay off handsomely. The film shuttles back and forth between the mid 1960s and the 1980s with two different actors playing Wilson in different periods of his life. Young Brian is Paul Dano, who portrays Wilson with wide eyes and an open mind but with a stinging emotional vulnerability. Old Brian is played by John Cusack, who is as foggy and frightened as Dano is clear and focused. Using multiple actors to play a famous figure has been tried before, most notably when Todd Haynes used six actors to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. But here the move feels completely appropriate. Wilson has said he looks back at the time before his breakdown and can’t recognize the person he used to be.

Elizabeth Banks and John Cusack

The 1960s segments tell the story of the creation of Pet Sounds, the recording of “Good Vibrations,” and the disastrous Smile sessions. Dano is brilliant as he fights off questions from his band, including Kenny Wormald as long-suffering Dennis Wilson and Jake Abel as the ambitious Mike Love. The high point of his performance is when he sings a sweet, aching version of “God Only Knows.” But his confidence melts when confronted with his manipulative, abusive father Murry Wilson (Bill Camp).

In the 1980s, we meet Cusack’s broken, scattered, middle-aged Brian as he haltingly reaches out to Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a glammy, Southern California Cadillac saleswoman who acts as the audience’s way into Brian’s cloistered world. Oren Moverman and Michael Lerner’s script expertly dribbles out disturbing details of the reclusive rock star lorded over by his psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Landy, played with gleeful evil by Paul Giamatti. Cusack, who has long been trapped in his own movie star persona, digs deep into this role, nailing Wilson’s shuffling walk and his pained expressions when he tries to play piano as well as he used to. Cusack gets some of the best lines in the film, like when Brian, explaining the creative process to Melinda, says, “Every once in a while, once in a blue moon, your soul comes out to play.”

Cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, a frequent Wes Anderson collaborator, shoots Southern California as both beautiful and alienating, as appropriate to the story. But director Pohlad’s secret weapon is his incredible sound design team, led by Eugene Gearty, who mixes snippets of Beach Boys songs with swirling, ambient sounds to reflect Wilson’s inner state. In an age where directors are content to use the unprecedented technology available in modern movie theaters just to make subwoofer “whomp” noises to telegraph dramatic moments, Pohlad and Gearty create a subtle, complex soundscape worthy of a film about a sonic genius. With a substantive story, a passionate cast and crew, and an experimental eye and ear, Pohlad has crafted one of the best movies of the year.

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Film About Joy Division Lead Singer is Effective Rock Biopic

When the Replacements were drunkenly stumbling toward indie-rock immortality in the mid-1980s, lead singer Paul Westerberg was still living and writing songs for his band’s major-label debut in his parents’ basement.

Why aren’t these revealing economic realities ever shown in movies about artists? Maybe most moviegoers can’t stomach the sight of poverty; maybe they like their cult heroes to emerge from the head of Zeus fully formed, rich and famous.

Director Anton Corbijn’s new film Control, about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, is a bracing success in part because it stares long and hard into what writer Michael Azerrad called “the yawning gap between critical acclaim and financial reward.”

Read the rest of Addison Engelking’s Flyer review here.

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An effective biopic of alt-rock icon Ian Curtis

When the Replacements were drunkenly stumbling toward indie-rock immortality in the mid-1980s, lead singer Paul Westerberg was still living and writing songs for his band’s major-label debut in his parents’ basement. Why aren’t these revealing economic realities ever shown in movies about artists? Maybe most moviegoers can’t stomach the sight of poverty; maybe they like their cult heroes to emerge from the head of Zeus fully formed, rich and famous. Director Anton Corbijn’s new film Control, about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, is a bracing success in part because it stares long and hard into what writer Michael Azerrad called “the yawning gap between critical acclaim and financial reward.”

Like I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ graduate thesis in Bob Dylan semiotics, Control rejects many biopic conventions, although some of these, like the grinding psychic toil of life on tour and the emotional fallout from the hero’s on-the-road philandering, now seem like an inevitable part of every rocker’s life story. I’m Not There is about the theory of cultural stardom; Control is about the everyday reality of a cultural star, especially before the royalties start rolling in.

Sam Riley plays Curtis as an intelligent, working-class Bowie-phile whose drive to create art co-existed uneasily with his decision to marry young, settle down, and have kids with his wife Deborah (a fierce and vulnerable Samantha Morton, whose gigantic, expressive eyes burn through a paper-thin role). One early sequence succinctly captures Curtis’ discrepant desires. The camera tracks Curtis’ morning walk to a government office, where he works as an employment counselor for people with mental and physical disabilities. Halfway through his walk, the camera glides behind him to show the word “HATE” scrawled in white on the back of his black jacket.

Unlike many rock-star pictures, Control is not interested in showing the fun of emerging stardom. Although they worked hard, the members of Joy Division don’t seem to share many moments of unambiguous creative joy. Their songs were notoriously “assembled,” sometimes instrument by instrument, in the recording studio. And the music they made could hardly be called cheerful. Still, the band’s following steadily increases, as Curtis’ desultory affair with a Belgian woman (Alexandra Maria Lara) and his increasing bouts of adult-onset epilepsy further unmoor him. Riley bravely underplays Curtis’ final days, suggesting that his suicide was somewhat motivated by the way the massive daily doses of prescription medication limited his ability to think clearly about the world around him.

Like many rock stars, Curtis was more in charge of his life when he was onstage, where he could simultaneously act out and escape his troubles. The recreations of Joy Division’s live performances are tense, strange, riveting; like Curtis, Riley dances in a weird march that makes him seem part sleep-deprived jungle trooper and part music-activated android, as if he were endlessly fighting a battle between self-expression and rigid, assembly-line conformity.

Control’s final shot of smoke blowing into the sky (while Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” plays in the background) offers a hint of resolution to Curtis’ struggles. It strikes notes of regret, melancholy, and hope that are as inexplicably affecting as the band’s best music.

Control

Opens Friday, December 21st

Ridgeway

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Tangled up in Dylan lore.

In 1998, Todd Haynes released Velvet Goldmine, a rapturous but prickly ode to glam-rock that referenced genre stars such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop but clung to a fan’s perspective.

He tries something similar with I’m Not There, a pop meditation “inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan” that is less concerned with presenting Dylan’s life in a realistic sense than on ruminating on the character of Dylan as experienced by his most ardent fans.

To do this, Haynes employs six actors — Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and African-American adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin — to play otherwise unconnected roles (none of them named “Bob Dylan”) that each embody a different facet of Dylan’s protean public persona.

Bale is the early, serious folkie Dylan in his first signs of dissatisfaction with the earnestness of the scene. Ledger is an actor who played lead in a “Dylan” biopic whose real life — in his courtship, marriage, and break-up with a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsbourg — represents the most widely known segment of Dylan’s own domestic life. Whishaw plays a man in an interrogation-style interview who claims to be (Dylan influence) Arthur Rimbaud. Franklin is a boxcar-hopping musician who dubs himself “Woody” after Woody Guthrie and eventually visits the great folksinger (as Dylan did) on his deathbed. Blanchett is a scream as the most iconic of Dylan figures, the messy-haired mid-Sixties rock prophet. And Gere — in a dull recurring segment that threatens to stop the movie dead — actually plays an aging Billy the Kid in a reference to the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which Dylan acted in and provided music for.

Through the weaving of these six sections, Haynes touches on reams of Dylan lore, iconography, and soundbites — his electric folk-festival debut, being called “Judas” in London, his relationship with Joan Baez, his motorcycle accident, his chauvinism, his embrace of Christianity, etc. The Blanchett scenes are the strongest, filmed in black-and-white to make them not just a reference to that period of Dylan’s career but to the way it’s been perceived through the lens of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back.

The result is probably the most personal and most ambitious musical “biopic” ever attempted. For remotely obsessive Dylan fans, it’s endlessly compelling, if not always successful. For more casual fans, it’s likely to be entirely inexplicable.

I’m Not There

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

Studio on the Square