FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies 

Anyone familiar with Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978) knows too well the abounding tedium of music documentaries. Despite its stature among the greatest of all rock docs, Waltz often serves merely to showcase how insufferably boring and pretentious rock deities can be when provided a platform upon which they’re invited to pontificate about their craft. If the musicians themselves decline to natter on about cultural legacies, rock critics with dubious credentials and penchants for hyperbolic appraisal are more than happy to fill in the blanks. Rock documentary belongs, on the whole, to a very sorry class of filmmaking. It’s almost certain that if you’re not interested in a particular rock band or artist, a documentary about that performer will not appeal to you. If the music in question does float your boat, you are more likely to find value in said film, though that isn’t to say that you’re very likely to find much value at all.  More often than not, the films lack imagination, trusting instead that the supposed genius of their subjects can be relied upon to form a coherent, engaging narrative. What’s more, these fawning portraits are then padded with lame duck concert footage, because, by the time a documentary crew arrives on the scene, the group in question is likely to be long past their prime.  If the band has broken up, grainy archival footage blandly suffices.  Most “rockumentaries” have more in common with the insipidness of This is Spinal Tap (1984) than with any great tradition of documentary cinema.

The growth of fan cultures, the escalating public interest in “reality”-based programming, and the democratization of professional-grade video equipment have conspired to birth a surplus of these documentaries in the digital-era.  All a band requires is a few obsessive devotees and some mild group tension for a documentary to practically unfurl itself.  Most vexing about these films is that their directors are so entranced by their love of the music that they neglect to vet the worthiness of the narrative.  Consequently, most fail to exceed the breadth and depth of their subject’s Wikipedia entries.  From this outpouring of enthusiasm a few are released theatrically every year, while the rest are intended as mere promotional tools, packaged alongside reissued albums or in limited edition DVDs for the faithful.  Their very failure at journalism or documentation makes these films most viable as facets of promotional campaigns. There are music movies and there are movies about music; both have their place, but only the latter can claim a potential for artistry.

When considered as cinema (that is, separately from their status as fan paraphernalia) quality rock docs are so few and far between that a nearly comprehensive list will fit inside of a short paragraph (1): Instrument (1999), The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), Lonely Boy (1962), Don’t Look Back (1967), Dig! (2004), Gimme Shelter (1970), Let It Be (1970), Hype! (1996), Meeting People is Easy (1998), Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) (1).  For this group, an interest in the music under discussion isn’t required (and, really, who gives a shit about the discography of Paul Anka or The Dandy Warhols, let alone Metallica’s St. Anger album?) for audiences to feel satisfied with the product.  These films succeed because they effectively document the alchemical processes of creating, performing and selling popular music.  They are not laurel wreaths bestowed upon demigods, but are, instead, thoughtful considerations of art-making and performance, created by artists in their own right.  Each exhibits a detachment from their subjects, a critical distance that provides them a perspective unobstructed by idolatry. These films, rare exceptions to the rule of pop documentaries, refuse to regurgitate lore and legend.

It may be that Steven Galkin and Matthew Cantor, co-directors of loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies, are indeed transfixed by the grandeur of their subjects. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe read the film’s verite unobtrusiveness as a sign the pair were “too awestruck” to challenge the band into accounting for their enduringly popular collaborations and acrimonious breakup (3).  There’s a great deal of merit to this interpretation, but the filmmakers’ timorousness has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of elevating the film from hagiography to a subtly probing snapshot of middle-aged rockers in pursuit of reunion tour fortune and glory.  Whether the group merely declined the invitation to wax nostalgically about their shared history, or the filmmakers simply lacked the desire or courage to ask, the film itself is a welcome respite from the dominant strain of such portraits.

After forming in Boston in the mid-1980s, the Pixies were modestly successful as an indie rock act, playing international festivals and releasing five acclaimed albums before disbanding in 1993.  After acolyte Kurt Cobain hyped them in interviews as a key influence, the group became known for instigating the now-familiar alt-rock formula of quietly singing the verses before screaming the choruses (hence the film’s title) (4).  At the time they called it quits, the band's influence on other musicians exceeded sales of their own albums as well as their mainstream recognition.  Rock music fandom has since caught up with the group. In 2004, their resurgent popularity among aging post-punks and the newfound enthusiasm of the Hot Topic set culminated in a reunion tour, the chief subject of loudQUIETloud.

Since the dissolution of the Pixies, songwriter/lead vocalist Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal have pursued recording careers successfully, the former with a slew of groups, the latter with beloved critical darlings, The Breeders.  Lead guitarist Joey Santiago stumbled in jumpstarting his own career, while drummer Dave Lovering took to performing as a magician.  Lovering is the semi-tragic figure of the four, and the most forthcoming during the film’s interview sections.  He admits that the offer to reunite with his bandmates came not a moment too soon, for his royalty checks had started to dwindle thanks to online file-sharing.

Later in the film, while grappling with the news that his father has died, Lovering launches an impromptu drum solo (likely the product of nervous energy and valium, though he denies intoxication to his bandmates) at the outset of their Chicago show, marking the lone moment of explicit tension within the ranks. Francis storms off stage, the band reconvenes, and Lovering chalks the whole thing up to a faulty PA system. The rest of the time they scarcely talk to one another. Struggling with newfound sobriety, Deal travels on a separate bus with twin sister Kelly, who at one point claims that she’s never observed a group of people for whom communication is so difficult.  An onscreen title informs us that the band has agreed to prohibit alcohol and drugs in the dressing room in deference to Deal's treatment.  Titles are the film’s preferred method for providing historical and personal context.  If the band won't tell their own story, the filmmakers will tell it for them via concise, one-sentence summations. It's not an uncommon strategy today, but in this case, informative titles provide too much contour for an otherwise (fantastically) shapeless portrait.      

By most accounts -- especially if you ask the legion of fans camped outside the venues -- the music hasn’t suffered since the hiatus, though the voices of Francis and Deal can’t work up the frenzy of 20 years ago.  All the same, they are adored by their fans, who at this point have the entirety of the band’s relatively scant discography memorized.  The entire tour sold out in a matter of minutes, another title tells us. Since the tour featured in loudQUIETloud, the band has played numerous festivals and are reportedly, as of early 2010, completing a comeback album.        

It seems perverse to describe the lack of melodrama as exciting in its own right, but the film’s intrigue exists in unvoiced frustrations and pent up resentments.  Multiple times, Francis tells rock journalists about the hows and whys of the band’s demise and rebirth, but he fails to state any of these feelings to his bandmates.  After telling an interviewer that he’d love to make a new record with the group, he neglects to tell everyone else. Interactions are uniformly respectful and deeply political.  These four have united toward a common goal, like divorced parents attending a softball game.  In an odd way, it’s comforting to know that these people might not get along, or at least that they’re not going to pretend to get along for the benefit of the cameras.  loudQUIETloud isn’t nearly Wisemenian in its commitment to the quotidian, but it’s a relaxed, unhurried snapshot of pop music-making.

Appropriately, the film’s most poignant moment is one of silence: A young fan -- who speaks of Deal in religious terms -- flags down her idol after the show and the two share a moment of mutual appreciation.  The adolescent girl had discovered the Pixies while reading a YA novel (Louisa Luna’s Brave New Girl) in which the band’s music and indie cred capture the protagonist’s heart.  Deal and her disciple chat amiably enough, but the girl forgets to slip her hero a cherished, highlighted copy of the book.  The scene ends as the girl sobs at having been so absent-minded.  The next scene features a solemn Deal (heretofore the most loquacious of the four) aboard the tour bus going through the book’s highlighted passages, which reference the music she made two decades previously (it's safe to assume a hanger-on or the filmmakers passed the book along).  It’s a weirdly cosmic moment, but Deal wears a silent, puzzled expression.  Confronted by such a tangible example of her impact upon a generation, what could she possibly be thinking? Like the rest of her bandmates, she just doesn't say. (5)

loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies / USA / 2006 / Color / 85 min. / Directed by Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin /  Featuring: Charles "Black Francis" Thompson, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago, David Lovering and Kelley Deal.

Notes:

1 - I’ll cop to not having seen these well-regarded rockdocs: Woodstock (1970), Stop Making Sense (1984), Cocksucker Blues (1972), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009), No Direction Home (2005), Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (2007), or (most embarrassingly) Buena Vista Social Club (1999).  Even if each of these count as genuine masterpieces, the final tally of great music documentaries would still rest at a pitifully low number.

2 – Indie icons Fugazi star in Instrument; Decline charts the emergence of American Punk in the southern California; Lonely Boy is the brilliant short doc, by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, about the fabrication of Paul Anka’s career and personality (which can be viewed here); the surly Bob Dylan lets D.A. Pennebaker’s camera tail him in Dont Look Back [sic]; Ondi Timoner captures the feud between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols in Dig!; the Maysles do Altamont in Gimme Shelter; The Beatles disintegrate while finishing their worst album in Let it Be; Doug Pray exposes the effects of corporate and media malfeasance on Seattle's early 90's grunge scene in Hype!; Radiohead become an Important Band in Meeting People; and Metallica disintegrate and regroup while finishing their worst album in Some Kind of Monster.

 3 - The review, from an acknowledged enthusiast, can be found here.

4 - Cobain claimed that "Smells like Teen Spirit," was merely a Pixies "rip off" in Rolling Stone magazine shortly before his death: 

Fricke, David "Kurt Cobain: The Rolling Stone Interview." Rolling Stone, #674. 27 Jan. 1994.

5 - loudQUIETloud can be viewed in its entirety here.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #20 - PALINDROMES

20. Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (2004)

One of the two or three candidates for contemporary U.S. cinema’s most brilliant unsung auteur, Todd Solondz has, since 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, crafted four singularly unpleasant comedies that excavate the fertile grounds of suburban angst (1).  But what separates Solondz’ black comedies of middle class anomie from the smugness of Alan Ball’s similarly-themed work is his ear for realistically human dialogue and his fierce compassion for, and commitment to the integrity of, his characters.  What elevates 2004’s Palindromes to the top of his oeuvre is the intensity of the sympathy at its core.  It’s a culminating moment for the director in which his scarred humanism and caustically satirical eye harmonize perfectly.  It’s wrenchingly tragic and blisteringly funny in the same breath. 

By often mischaracterizing him as a sadist or misanthrope, Solondz’ critics have continuously failed to distinguish between the author and his characters or between his subjects and themes.  Sadism and misanthropy are issues of abiding interest to Solondz, but only the most superficial reading of his work could conclude that he, as a filmmaker, is as contemptuous or malevolent as some of his characters.  He extends even the most retched of humanity (pedophiles, murderers, would-be rapists) the decency of an emotionally accurate portrait, allowing his creations to speak unfettered by political correctness or narrative convention.     

The shy daughter of well-to-do liberals, Palindromes’ Aviva decides at 13 that what she wants, more than anything in the world, is to have a baby.  An exceedingly brief, fumbling sexual interlude leads to pregnancy, and the contented girl’s mother (Ellen Burstyn) cajoles her into having an abortion.  Disconsolate after the procedure, Aviva – unaware that surgical complications have left her barren – runs away from home, encountering a pedophilic truck driver and a foster family of evangelical Christians on her journey toward another pregnancy.  The wit and candor of the script are classically Solondzian in their audacity, but his most profound statement lay in the film’s casting: over the course of Palindromes, Aviva is played by eight uniformly brilliant actors of various genders, ethnicities, ages and dimensions.   Aviva’s appearance and voice change every few scenes, but her desire for motherhood and foggy understanding of adulthood are ever consistent.  The trick may have been used decades ago by Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and more recently by Todd Haynes in the exasperating Dylan-hymn I’m Not There (2007), but Solondz thoroughly weds the potential gimmick to the underlying theme of his work: the existence of an inflexible core within us, which is heedless of our attempts at reinvention and self-definition.   

As Aviva’s cousin, Mark, cynically claims at film’s end: “People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do, but they don’t… You might lose some weight, your face might clear up, get a body tan, a breast enlargement, a sex change … makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind, whether you’re 13 or 50, you’ll always be the same.”  The idea is anathema to the American narrative’s ideal of dynamic characterizations, asserted most obnoxiously in the didacticisms of screenwriting gurus Robert McKee and Syd Field.  We go to the movies to watch fictitious people change, in an attempt to renounce the knowledge that we most likely will not.  This is not an entirely unhealthy proposition, but the nearly complete absence of alternative characterizations is disproportionate to human experience.

Again, critics may confuse Solondz with his misanthropic creation Mark.  Though the two share a general understanding of human psychology (Solondz characters are static by rule), they differ in their philosophical assessments of the self’s perpetuity.  Mark’s defeatism is Solondz’ surrender and acceptance.  To audiences and critics queasy at the prospect of zero-growth characters, the difference would appear negligible.  Mark might deem the shared conception a tyranny of selfhood; Solondz, however, using the full weight of his story and characters, unearths an appreciation for human frailty from the contention that we are essentially who we are for the bulk of our existence.  Human lives would prove hopelessly erratic and uncentered if we continually subjected ourselves to the redemptions, epiphanies and upheavals that masquerade as growth in our narrative art.  The human condition, Solondz argues, is best honored via faithful, compassionate observation, rather than idealistic reshuffling prompted by misguided quests for meaning. 

 Notes:

1 – Larry Clark would be the other. Expect reevaluations of both in the coming decades.

HOLLOW BONES

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones

Fifteen years after Peter Jackson’s international breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures (1994), New Zealand’s virtuoso of the digital spectacular rekindles his passion for fantastical landscapes and the charred innocence of pubescent girls with The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Sebold. 

Steadily attaining a foothold in Hollywood’s upper echelon since Creatures, Jackson has reached the film industry’s twin zeniths: he owns multiple slots among the highest-grossing films along with multiple Academy statues.  Appropriately, his aesthetic has assumed the grandiosity befitting his status alongside the Spielbergs and the Camerons.  Like the former, Jackson has an itch to intersperse small, “personal” projects between his slate of Megabudget Romps, but, like the latter, he’s also developed, stylistically speaking, a crippling sense of magnitude.  During The Lovely Bones, an intimate portrait of a family ravaged by tragedy is pancaked under the weight of PJ’s operatic style and broadly swathed dramatic instincts.  Jackson is clearly a superior storyteller to Cameron, and his King Kong remake beats the hell out of Spielberg’s most recent stabs at spectacle, but he’s lost the ability to fly low and maneuver his lumbering style into coexistence with delicate scenarios.  An auteur in the truest sense, his voice irrevocably booms across, over and through his films, producing an inhospitable environment for anything save Event Films and Summer Tentpoles.  This development is all well and good – and is more likely than not to leave audiences satisfied -- so long as he learns to avoid material such as Sebold’s novel.  

The Lovely Bones, as we’re told in breathy voice over by Susie (played with appropriate gracelessness by Saoirse Ronan), tells the story of how the Salmons family processes their eldest daughter’s unsolved murder.  The film is split in half dramatically: one section is set in a kind of sun-drenched purgatory in which Susie frolics with other murder victims and contemplates the division between life and death, while the remainder takes place in a dreary suburb where her family threatens to unravel after her killing.  Mark Wahlberg – enjoyable, but straining credibility as a middle-aged, middle-class Daddy -- plays the relentless father who refuses to let his daughter’s killer go unpunished.   A forgettable Rachel Weisz is Susie’s flaky mother and Susan Sarandon cameos as the alcoholic grandmother, though both never quite find suitable niches within the film. A subplot involving a romance between Susie’s former crush and a clairvoyant farmer’s daughter never really pays off or generates much friction.

The lone dramatic idea that Jackson and his screenwriters can muster is that the living and the dead must relinquish one another if they’re to find happiness.  Daddy and co. must move on and enjoy what’s left of their own lives, while Susie must refrain from meddling if she is to acclimate herself to the world beyond.  Most troubling about the film is the way in which happiness after death, a somewhat absurd notion crafted here from pure kitsch, is defined.  We spend a good deal of time lolling about Susie’s eternity as she agonizes over what’s become of her family.  It is an afterlife of luscious pastures, gazebos and lighthouses, the culmination of which (once the departed have learned not to fret the dealings of the living) is a blindingly white meadow for Susie and her newfound gal pals to trample through.  Pretty uninspiring stuff, and it all looks like a botched collaboration dreamed up by Thomas Kincaid and Lisa Frank.  One has to wonder if this is Jackson’s ideal resting place for the deceased, or if he’s merely burrowing his way into the metaphysical fantasies of suburban teenagers.  The film doesn’t ultimately say, thus frustrating viewers who attempt to orient themselves within the filmmaker’s jumbled formulations.

Also tragic is the way in which the geography of real tension, the domestic turmoil of the fanatically devoted father and the evading mother, is abandoned in favor of Susie’s paradise of digital de-lites. A born storyteller, Jackson occasionally scares up real juice as the Salmons clan struggles to keep themselves intact while the neighbor who murdered their daughter (the terrifyingly mundane Stanley Tucci) contemplates his next victim.  The opportunities are squandered, however, as Jackson is more concerned with exhibiting celestial reflecting pools and swooping camera movements that would both feel more innocuous in Middle Earth or Skull Island.  The quintessential Jackson shot – the camera arcing in a hovering sweep over the landscape, resembling the POV of a plummeting hang-glider – is disjunctive in this context.  It’s simply too bombastic for the material. 

Those familiar with Jackson’s upchuck classics Meet the Feebles (1989) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead, 1992) might chortle at hearing descriptors like “subdued” or  “unassuming” applied to them, but as excessive as each is in terms of content, there is a much looser, modest quality to their aesthetic and execution than what’s on display in the histrionic The Lovely Bones (1).  Jackson’s ascendant style since Feebles has little retrospective character.  His formerly delicate execution is no longer tenable due to his (well-deserved) stature as the Modern Spectacular’s greatest talent.  From the standpoint of the horror convention crowd, it’s a lamentable forfeit.  But, in this case, the Midnight Movie’s loss is the Multiplex Blockbuster’s gain.     

Beyond Tucci’s marvelously unsettling performance, The Lovely Bones’ chief source of satisfaction is its rough, ambling structure.  Gone is the carefully etched dramatic triangle of Jackson’s recent films, which navigate rather single-mindedly toward massive, conclusive battles.  Though laden with clumsy foreshadowing and banal metaphors -- both visual and literal – The Lovely Bones is refreshing and intriguing during the moments when the story refrains from announcing its intentions so directly, thereby allowing for anticlimaxes and diversions that offer something close to satisfying viewing.  Nestled within a glut of ham-fisted dialogue and cheesecake effects, these could be considered the film’s more novelistic qualities (2).  Still, as with the rest of the film, these virtues are swallowed by Jackson’s thunderous vision. 

The Lovely Bones / USA, UK, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 122 min. / Directed by Peter Jackson / Written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens / Based on the novel by Alice Sebold / Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon / Wingnut Films, DreamWorks SKG 

Notes:

1 – The former is a backstage drama set in a bizarro Sesame Street populated by degenerate muppets; the latter is an inverse Night of the Living Dead, wherein the hero must keep his zombie mother from escaping their home. Though anarchically comic in tone, it may be the bloodiest film ever made, which, depending on one’s point-of-view, may be Jackson’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker.

2 – I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the source novel, though have heard from trusted sources that the most glaring divergence between the film and the book is in the depiction of the crime: in the former Susie is murdered in a bloodless sequence, while in the book she is brutally raped and butchered.  Make what you will of Jackson’s refusal to shoot such a sequence.