Capone's Art-House Round-Up with I SAW THE LIGHT, BORN TO BE BLUE, and KING GEORGES!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


I SAW THE LIGHT
You might presume that a biography film of someone with the chart-topping success that Hank Williams had in the 1940s and early part of the ’50s would be an easy one to get right. You just let the familiar (and maybe a few less popular) tunes play, re-create a few career and life highlights and lowlights, address the vices—women, alcohol, drugs—that ravaged his health and started to destroy his reputation and career, and you’ve got yourself a solid movie, due in large part to a haunting portrayal of Williams by Tom Hiddleston (the THOR movies, CRIMSON PEAK, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE), whose uncanny resemblance to the singer is essential.

But what writer-director Marc Abraham does instead is present us with moments from a time in Williams’ life when he was just beginning to get famous until his untimely death at age 29. The songs are fairly well represented, beginning with an a cappella version of Williams performing “Cold, Cold Heart” under a single spotlight with a barely visible audience surrounding him. The moment is key because it establishes right away that Hiddleston is doing his own singing. It also captures Williams as the man alone, despite having millions of fans, and it forces us to listen to the powerfully painful poetry that made up so many of Williams’ sad songs.

Two scenes later, we see Williams in the real world, in a honky tonk filled with all types of folks, from bored husbands to wives who have a crush on the singer with the crooked smile. The camera doesn’t begin on Hank; it moves through the crowd, studying faces and slowly makes its way to the stage, where Williams is waiting with his cowboy hat so low on his brow that you can barely see his eyes. For all the issues I have with the film, the opening few scenes are fantastic.

The greatest overall problem with I SAW THE LIGHT is the lack of transitions. We go from bad event to good event to bad event with no real sense of how one moment impacted the next, if it did at all. And while I appreciate that Abraham was allowing the audience to make the connections for ourselves and not guide us through the story by the hand, a little guidance would have been appreciated. The filmmaker isn’t interested in setting up a tale that establishes: “This is why Hank Williams was the way he was.” There’s even an amusing line from Williams’ mother Lillie (Cherry Jones) who declares that she knows he’s her son only because she was there when he was born, but even she doesn’t know where his singing and songwriting gift came from. Fair enough, but give us something to hang our metaphorical hat on.

A lot can be forgiven because of how strong Hiddleston’s work is here. When Williams first appears on his beloved Grand Ole Opry radio program, he’s smiling so big, the audience listening in could probably see it. In fact, all of the live performances are mesmerizing, watching the actor inhabit the singer, swinging his hips just enough to get the crowd going, wearing ridiculous fringe-laden Western wear, and eyeing the crowd and backstage area looking for a would-be female conquest. One of the best performance moments in the movie doesn’t even involve a song. It’s a Dallas show where Williams is so strung out that he comes to the microphone sweating, sunken, invoking the name and poetry of his alter-ego Luke the Drifter, a character who some believe was closer to the real Williams than the popular hillbilly singer.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Elizabeth Olsen’s brave and bold portrayal of Williams’ wife Audrey, who pushed him and managed his career quite successfully. She was an outspoken woman in a time when such women were frowned upon. She also fancied herself a singer, which she was not, and this caused additional friction between Hank and potential booking agents. She tried to be a forgiving wife when it came to cheating, but when they had their first child, she wanted a stable environment that Hank simply couldn’t provide.

But again, transitions become a problem with I SAW THE LIGHT. There’s a brief sequence that shows Williams detoxing in rehab and swearing he’s sober in order to win Audrey back. A few scenes later at a holiday party, Hank has a drink in his hand. I’m assuming that he proved himself just enough that when he did pick up a beer, Audrey let it slide. She makes some vague comment about cutting him off, but that’s it. Something feels like it’s missing, and a great deal of the film feels like we’re going from A to C while removing B because we need to get to D quicker.

If the film was rushing to another big performance piece, I might forgive these dropouts, but often Abraham is taking us to another moment of establishing characters (which I’m normally all in favor of). As a result, the pacing of the film feels choppy and uneven at times. There are also a couple of moments where we see what appear to be interviews with people in Williams’ professional life, such as Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford), who gives us a little insight into career happenings, but those moments feel like inserts placed within the story to give us exposition. It’s classic tell-don’t-show, and it gives us nothing essential.

Strangely enough, the one scene featuring an actual journalist (David Krumholtz) gives us the least amount of exposition and a great deal of vital internal details into Williams’ dark mindset. He’s clearly miserable doing the interview, and eventually it falls apart when the writer digs too deep into his personal life, but it’s a critical scene that reveals how Williams saw himself and how he believed his admirers saw him as well.

I liked that we got glimpses of other women important to his life, including girlfriend Bobbie Jett (Wrenn Schmidt) and his second wife Billie Jean Jones (Maddie Hasson), who seemed like a step in the right direction for Hank, since she was young and would take no crap from him. I Saw the Light gets so much right that it’s almost a bigger disappointment that it can’t make the pieces fit together more convincingly. There are zero issues with the performances or the misty, slightly worn-out cinematography by Dante Spinotti (HEAT, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, WONDER BOYS). The issues lie in the screenplay and perhaps somewhat in the editing, but without working pieces, there’s little an editor can do. Go to I SAW THE LIGHT for the music and try not to focus too hard on the rest.


BORN TO BE BLUE
It’s become weirdly poisonous to do “cradle-to-grave” film biographies any more. I still think there is some value to that style of storytelling, but regardless, nobody really does them any longer outside of the documentary realm. Instead, filmmakers tend to focus on one or two key periods in an artist’s life on which to concentrate (see the Brian Wilson story told in LOVE & MERCY as an example, or the upcoming MILES AHEAD about music re-inventor Miles Davis). This week’s other big music biopic, the Hank Williams’ story I SAW THE LIGHT, only tackles the singer-songwriter’s fame years. Quite wisely, BORN TO BE BLUE shines the spotlight on perhaps the most painful and difficult years in the life of jazz horn player and singer Chet Baker (a career-best performance from Ethan Hawke).

Baker had an array of troubles by the time the 1960s were in full swing. The Prince of Cool was a dedicated heroin addict, and he had his teeth beaten out of his head under shady circumstances, effectively ending his career and forcing him to relearn to play the trumpet with false teeth if he ever hoped to recapture his former glory of soft, seductive playing that typified the West Coast jazz movement. Baker also wasn’t much respected by other jazz greats. When he played shows in New York, cats like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie would come see him, with mixed reactions. Writer-director Robert Budreau (THAT BEAUTIFUL SOMEWHERE) paints Baker as both a victim of circumstance, lacking in confidence that his silky, polished sound would ever be accepted by the mostly white jazz greats, and a man who needed drugs to cope with his problems and fears.

Hawke is extraordinary in BORN TO BE BLUE. His face and expressions convey a sense that Baker was always on the brink of crying or otherwise falling apart, especially when he was afraid of never playing again. You look at Hawke’s Baker and you understand why people wanted to help him, and it wasn’t just because he was a moving player. He looked lost and afraid, and they wanted to steer him in the right direction. Two major figures in his life emerge in the film. SELMA’s Carmen Ejogo plays Jane, an actress Baker meets and instantly falls in love with. His desire to clean up comes from her, and while he relearned the trumpet, he stayed off heroin because he wanted to be his best for her. Also in his corner, reluctantly at times, is Callum Keith Rennie, who plays friend and rising record exec Dick, who set Baker up in a place to rehearse, get his stage legs back, and prepare for an audition so that Baker can get a record contract again and start playing sizable gigs.

BORN TO BE BLUE doesn’t rely entirely on facts and nothing but, and it doesn’t hurt the experience in any way. There’s a running thread through the beginning of the film that involves a never-made Dino De Laurentis-produced film about Baker starring Baker. It’s a black-and-white picture that we see glimpses of, and it’s clear that that movie would have been a melodramatic fiction. Budreau uses it as a means to separate the overly simplified version of Baker’s story with something a little closer to the emotional truth, and it’s an idea that works beautifully. My biggest complaint with the film is that the device vanishes much too soon in the running time. Still, it’s impossible to deny Hawke’s devastating work here, supported by a surprisingly well-written female character for Ejogo to inhabit. If you see just one music biopic this month, this would be my choice.


KING GEORGES
The onslaught of documentaries about chefs and famous restaurants isn’t surprising at all since the concept of the celebrity chef is a fairly modern development thanks to dozens of popular reality shows. But one of the first master chefs to make his name in America was Georges Perrier, whose world famous Le Bec-Fin restaurant in Philadelphia was designated the top restaurant in the United States for almost more years than can be documented. Perrier brought the concept of elegant French cooking (and its accompanying high prices) to America, along with its emphasis on succulent sauces and elaborate decor (including a pair of massive chandeliers in a relatively small space).

From first-time feature director (and long-time doc producer) Erika Frankel, KING GEORGES spends many months with the master chef in a period in the restaurant’s history where it began to feel the impact of a declining economy. He announces the venue is finally going to shut his doors, but an outpouring from both local dignitaries and peers from around the world causes a change of heart, and he decides to keep things going a while longer, with his faithful sous chef and partner Nicholas Elmi (who went on to win “Top Chef” not long ago), who has long been the clear heir apparent to run Le Bec-Fin when Georges finally stepped down.

There’s not getting around that Chef Georges possesses a fiery personality. His rants aimed at his staff are well known and well documented in this movie. The four-letter words and other completely inappropriate insults are hurled as masterfully and liberally as the cream and salt he likes to add to his sauces when the other cooks aren’t looking. It’s sometimes horrifying to watch the staff sit quietly and absorb the insults, but they all agree that it’s the most effective way to learn from this perfection-oriented master. The mild-mannered Elmi seems to have the most well-balanced life of the two, with a wife and young child, while Perrier talks of losing his family as a result of being only truly married to his work. Elmi gets a kick out of his friend’s emotional eruptions, even when they’re aimed at him, and that seems to be the force that binds them.

Director Frankel has access to some incredible archival footage and photos, including Perrier’s many talk show appearances. He was the toast of the town for decades but the 2000s brought a changing tide in young foodies’ tastes. It’s impossible not to notice that most of Le Bec-Fin’s customers are much older, dressed to the nines, and probably wouldn’t get caught dead in a restaurant that focuses on molecular gastronomy. At the film’s heart is a father-son relationship between Georges and Nicholas; they depend and lean on each other in such a sweet way. But they’re also clearly enabling each other’s excesses and vices in the kitchen and in life. KING GEORGES takes us into the secret world of a master chef’s kitchen and allows us to engage with the very human folks that dwell there.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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