(Reviews of Timestalker; Portraits of Dangerous Women; Two Minutes; and In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon)
TIMESTALKER.
Having impressed with her writer-actor-directorial debut, Prevenge (2016), scene-stealer extraordinaire Alice Lowe takes us on a tumble down the centuries in Timestalker, an Orlando-like odyssey that's as much Monty Python as Virginia Woolf, with bits of Bens Elton and Wheatley tossed in for good measure.
In 1688, a Scottish spinning maid named Agnes (Alice Lowe) pricks her finger as Scottie dog George runs off with a bobbin of yarn. Tripping regularly on her way through a field of heather, she joins Meg (Tanya Reynolds) and a fishwife (Kate Dickie) in the crowd about to watch Covenanter preacher Alex (Aneurin Barnard) be broken on the wheel. She's enchanted by his good looks and so moved when he entrusts her with the small bird he's holding in his hand and promises to see her in her dreams that she charges the dais - only to trip and embed a halberd in her forehead, thus enabling Alex to escape.
The Agnes of 1793 is suffering from ennui and is not best pleased when her maid, Meg, suggests relieving her tension with the dildo she found under the bed. Instead, she takes a tonic and explains that she feels haunted by memories of a place she has never visited. When brutish husband, George (Nick Frost), sends her to town to be measured for a pink, heart-shaped wig to wear to the ball, Agnes is thrilled to witness highwayman Alex O'Nine Ribbons relieving himself on some mushrooms in the woods. She is also pleased to be given a caged bird by the perruquier, but fails to recognise the irony when it's pointed out by her fencing master, Scipio (Jacob Anderson), who gives her a lecture on freedom during a lesson.
Equally unaware of Meg's devotion, Agnes suffers the humiliation of being fitted with a leash and made to yap obediently when George comes to her boudoir. This prompts her to try and release the bird, but it won't leave the cage, in spite of her yonic curses and some prodding with the dildo (that has also been of interest to her fluffy white cat).
Appalled by George burning her books, Agnes instructs her coachman to drive up and down the forest road until Alex finally appears to demand she stands and delivers. With Meg looking on, Agnes reveals that she and Alex have met before and she agrees to help him fulfil his dream of celebrity before he pistol-whips her and steals her jewellery. Returning home to discover she has the pox and that her baby son is indifferent to her, Agnes experiences a series of visions that whisk her through time (at one point envisaging herself as a self-flagellating Victorian governess).
Having spotted Alex at the ball, Agnes dances with him, while George gambles with his friends. Taking the cat eating her red canary as a sign, she begs Alex to take her to France. But he thinks her heart wig looks like an arse and is about to wriggle his way out when George catches them and drags them home. He leaves Alex in the hall, while he goes to punish his wife for ruining his reputation. She vows to return, even if he kills her, and Alex takes the opportunity to scarper, as Agnes sees her many lives flashing before her eyes, as she is decapitated with a single slice of George's sword.
The Agnes of 1847 also loses her head, as she is struck down by a carriage while pursuing Alex after they walk past each other outside a country chapel. But there is no time to dwell on her, as New York in 1980 beckons for an Agnes who has newly arrived and is enjoying aerobics and roller-skating with her feminist friend, Meg. She's obsessed, however, with a New Romantic pop star Alex Phoenix and is dismayed when she reads a magazine profile in which he declares his dislike of mushrooms (which had been their code word in 1793).
Paying $300 to have her fortune told, Agnes leaves no wiser about her fate or why she keeps seeing herself as Cleopatra. However, she does learn from Dooms the tarot reader (Zach Wyatt) that she would be best off keeping her knickers on, even though she doesn't want to. Meg thinks her plan to stalk Alex is insane and leaves after Agnes claims she would rather be a slave than a lesbian. But this makes Agnes more determined than ever to fulfil her destiny.
Aware that she is also being spied upon by an unkempt stranger (Nick Frost), Agnes hangs around below Alex's hotel window and fights another fan for a keepsake she puts in a heart-shaped tin in her handbag. Here she also keeps the red bird that flies down from the room and it escapes in a diner where Agnes is chatting to Alex's manager, Scipio. He has rumbled she isn't a magazine writer, but gives her backstage passes anyway because he is tired of being Alex's dogsbody.
Their conversation is briefly interrupted by a news report about a pop star being shot dead, but Agnes is relieved to learn it is only John Lennon. When Scipio asks if she's a fan, she denies it and is surprised when he suggests that the world would be a better place without Alex. Even Dooms avers that the only way for her to stop repeating her painful lessons of history is for Alex to perish instead of her.
Wearing a tricorn hat, she cycles to the theatre and confronts Alex in his dressing-room. He doesn't recognise her from the past and freaks out when she produces a gun so he can have immortality. Scipio enters, but is disappointed when Agnes admits she's not a revolutionary, just a fan and she leaves after getting Alex to sign a photo.
Leaving the theatre, she has a vision of herself as a medieval woman straddling Alex before walking towards a large pink heart-shaped sculpture in the wood. Suddenly, she finds herself in a group therapy session with the psychiatrist (Kate Dickie) informing her that everything she has experienced has happened in her head because she became fixated on a pop star who was always out of reach. The others in the group (who include Nick Frost) applaud Agnes for making a breakthrough and realising that, by surviving the latest scenario, she has freed herself of the entombing fantasy.
Agnes apologises to Meg, only to dismay her with the news that she is engaged to marry George, a hot dog seller who squirts her with ketchup when he's introduced. On the wedding day, Agnes has a flashback to 1940, when she was dressed as Cleopatra in George's knife-throwing act. She had spotted Alex in uniform at one of the tables before an air raid siren sounded and she comes back into the present to jilt George at the altar. He chases after her and pins her with a blade before agreeing to let her go because she needs to be free. Before she dies, Agnes tells Meg that she believes in reincarnation and hopes they can find each other again.
Finding herself in a pink nowhere, Agnes is joined on a bench by Scipio. He informs her that she has used up her allocation of reincarnations and will now merge into the cosmos. She refuses, however, declaring herself to be her own god, as she revives in her wedding dress and tracks down Alex on stage in a crummy venue to release them from the spiral by shooting them both through the head as they kiss.
An epilogue takes us to 2117, as Agnes, Meg, and George are tooling up to confront the riot police awaiting them outside what looks like a stately squat. As she raises her rolling pin, Agnes sees Alex and turns to flee when he raises his visor and calls her by name.
Although time occasionally hangs heavily - especially in the latter stages - this is a spirited lament on behalf of all those women who have wasted their lives searching for Mr Right and settling for someone who will do (the modern equivalent having his own teeth and a driving licence). It's also a knowing lampoon of romantic fiction and those time-travelling movies in which true love eventually wins out. Yet Lowe also implies that unreasonable expectation makes things difficult for anyone in a relationship and that even creatures as flawed as men can sometime genuinely be doing their best when they fall short.
As always, Lowe delivers a deadpanning masterclass, with her Englightenment-seeking Agnes being the pick of her incarnations. The 80s version has a good gag about her Barry Gibb-style perm making her look like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. But the segment dawdles around Agnes's erotomanic delusion, with the exchanges with Meg as beret-wearing activist and George as a vulgarian voyeur lacking the incision of the similar Blackadderish exchanges with Meg the saucy maid and George the cur-like squire. By contrast, the Victorian and Blitz sequences are exemplars of wit and concision, although more time might have been spent on the Scottish opening, which is too rushed to develop the characters or their context. Nevertheless, Lowe merits commendation for the slick way in which she lets Kate Dickie's shrink tie up the loose ends in placing the scenario is a plausible psycho-babble context.
The support playing is first rate, with Anderson bringing charisma to a largely expository role, while Reynolds and Barnard are afforded more opportunity to amuse than Frost, who is mostly required to grunt and gurn outside the Georgian sequence. Working on a modest budget, Felicity Hickson's production design, Rebecca Gore's costumes, and Nicola Buck's wigs are outstanding and allow Lowe and cinematographer Ryan Eddleston to adjust the mood depending on the timeframes, which are neatly assembled (complete with punctuating flashbacks and cutaways) by editors Chris Dickens and Mátyás Fekete. Moiling beneath the slick surface, however, is an ambient appreciation of horror tropes, with Hammer bodice-ripping inflecting the 1793 scenes (which also contain echoes of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, 1975) and giallo anxiety jagging through the dayglo MTVness of the 1980 section. As for the humour, it veers to excellent effect from Carry On crassness to Smack the Pony knowingness, as Lowe prevents easy identification with evasive Agnes, who is often as much at the mercy of her own delusions, as she endures her horrible histories, as she is a put-upon victim of love.
PORTRAITS OF DANGEROUS WOMEN.
British-based Swiss director Pascal Bergamin follows up Nice Guy (2012) with Portraits of Dangerous Women, a shaggy dog story that feels as if it's being made up as it goes along. That's not necessarily a criticism, however, as the gentle strangeness of the rambling non-narrative remains vaguely intriguing almost in spite of itself and the cumbersome contrivance employed to set up the disarming denouement.
Primary school teacher Steph (Jeany Spark) is busy off-loading to art-dealing father, Jon (Mark Lewis Jones), how unpopular she has become when she runs over a dog in the road. The poor animal had already been clipped by Tina (Tara Fitzgerald), who is being berated by Ashley (Yasmin Monet Prince) for killing her pet. As it turns out, Tina is the new caretaker at the school and Steph drives her home in her car (with the corpse in the boot), while Jon gives Ashley a lift to dissuade her from reporting the incident to the police in the hope they all go to jail.
In fact, the dog doesn't belong to Ashley and she confesses as much to the duty sergeant at the police station (Cavan Clerkin), who tells her a story about a hawk snatching a schoolboy from the playground. His boss, Cathryn (Abigail Crittenden), is Jon's half-sister and she reassures him that no crime has been committed. She also does a background check on Ashley and finds she has no record apart from a little drunken teenage housebreaking in Devon.
Ashley brings her collection of vernacular photographs to Jon's gallery in the hope he'll exhibit them. While, he doesn't think they have a market value, he invites Ashley for soup and Steph joins them to follow up her father's inquiry about the deposit loan he had given her some years before. She lives with Paul (Gary Shelford), but the shaky nature of their relationship is exposed when Steph brings home Sheba, the ageing pug-nosed ginger cat she opted to adopt over some cute kittens at the animal shelter run by Steve (David Mumeni) and his mum.
Cathryn discovers that Ashley lost the hearing in one ear in the car crash that killed her mother and resulted in an insurance payout that enables her to live without a job. Convinced she has an eye for a picture, Ashley is surprised when the elderly Nancy (Sheila Reid) gives her a family photo album to help keep the memories alive, especially of her lost love, the first female bus driver in Liverpool in 1953. Ashley also offers encouragement to Claude (Joseph Marcell), a local artist whose worth has been overlooked by Jon. He is fretting about some paintings that have gone missing following a visit by two clients from Cottbus. When he mentions them to Cathryn, she pays a call on Ashley, who is offended by the accusation and Jon is forced to take her on as his assistant to atone.
They celebrate at the snack kiosk where Marco (Nick Cavaliere) keeps a bottle of grappa for special customers. Tina joins them for a drink, but no one overhears Doreen (Annette Badland) telling Marco about the faithful dog that had run away before she could take it to the vet to be put down. Concluding that we all need happy memories to sustain us through the inevitable dark times, she takes her leave. Meanwhile, Steph has returned Sheba to the shelter at Paul's behest and has kissed Steve. She gets a bigger surprise, however, when Paul decides to move out and she's suddenly single.
Tina finds Steph in her classroom and confides that she had once been an accountant, who had wound up behind bars after her crook husband persuaded her to launder some money. She admits to missing her life of crime and the camaraderie of her mob, but she cuts her confession short to coerce Steph into helping her bury the dog in the woods. Shortly afterwards, she has a party in the school hall (without permission) to celebrate her divorce, although it ends abruptly when Steph slips and has to be hospitalised.
At her bedside, Tina reveals that she's been fired and tells Steph not to be so foolish when she offers to resign in solidarity. As they're leaving, they run into Doreen who asks if they can take her to Alexander's grave, as she would like to pay her last respects. Before she leaves town, Tina hosts an exhibition of Claude's paintings and Ashley's photos in her garden shed. Sipping wine, Jon smiles as Steph buys a picture of a girl from another time and place who bears an uncanny resemblance.
The notion that we all have our secrets and that it's impossible to really know even our nearest and dearest may not be particularly novel. But Bergamin explores it with a mischievous glint in this episodic, at times sitcomedic, saga, which takes inspiration from Peter J. Cohen's book, Snapshots of Dangerous Women, to ponders the fact that memories fade even as images survive. Yet for all the revelations that tumble out during the course of this amiable yarn scripted by Bergamin and Stephan Teuwissen, the characters remain largely unknowable and it's hard to invest much emotional or intellectual energy in their misdemeanours and muddles.
The performances are generously genial, however, with Spark and Fitzgerald seeming to have drifted in from an untethered Mike Leigh scenario. Lewis Jones and Monet Prince also amuse, although their scenes never quite seem to flow as naturally. Indeed,
the picture as a whole doesn't quite gel. But Dankuro Shinma's views of the Surrey and Sussex countryside have a homeliness that is reinforced by Jonas Bühler's quaintly quirky score.
TWO MINUTES.
Speaking of Annette Badland, she can also be seen this week at the London Film Festival in Jamie Benyon's new short, Two Minutes. This is an amusingly sweet vignette that opens with Jimmy (Samuel Bottomley) and Anthony (Ashley Margolis) preparing to rob a corner Londis store. As the getaway driver awaits the gunman's return, however, his nan taps on the windscreen and insists on slipping into the passenger seat. Despite his pleading for her to chat another time, she insists on giving him a boiled sweet because he's looking tense.
Neatly staged in and around the parked vehicle, the encounter takes place against a ticking clock placed on the dashboard. Typically, Badland is a delight, as the widow cottoning on to what her grandsons are doing and there's genuine poignancy in their parting reassurance for her not to worry, as a police siren wails in the distance.
This LFF entry is markedly different from both the atmospherically foreboding and beautifully photographed experimental film, Still Chaos (2016) - which boasts a choral score by Joanna Carselis - and lover's kiss (2021), a silent pastiche with a jangly piano accompaniment that chronicles a female director's determination to get the last shot for a back garden labour of love that harks back to William Heise's The Kiss (1896), an 18-second excerpt from the Broadway musical, The Widow Jones, that captures the earliest embrace in screen history, between John Rice and May Irwin.
With two features - The Woman Who Came to Dinner (2015) and The Grandisons (2019) - already on his CV and an editing credit for Jon Sanders's A Clever Woman (2021), Benyon is clearly a talent and it's to be hoped his big chance comes along.
IN RESTLESS DREAMS: THE MUSIC OF PAUL SIMON.
Documentarist Alex Gibney has covered some ground during the course of an impactful, if eclectic career. Since making Jimi Hendrix and the Blues (2001), he has periodically focussed on musicians, with Finding Fela and Mr Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (both 2014) being followed by the exemplary, Sinatra: All or Nothing At All (2015). Now, after a decade exploring a range of hot-button issues, he has returned to music with In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, an epic survey of a master songwriter that will be screening in UK cinemas for just a single day.
Opening in Wimberley, Texas, as Paul Simon takes a break from recording Seven Psalms to guest on the local radio station, Gibney flashes back to the Queens childhood, when Simon's four heroes were Mickey Mantle, John F. Kennedy, Lenny Bruce, and Elvis Presley. He recalls meeting Art Garfunkel at school when they were 10 and tells a story about the weird kid who got barred from the candy store for shaking boxes to gauge which was the fullest.
Fascinated by Don and Phil Everley, Simon and Garfunkel used to practice harmonies on a tape machine after having palled up while playing the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat in a school production of Alice in Wonderland. Having scratched his new copy of `Bye Bye Love', Simon took another four buses (two each way) to Jamaica, Queens to purchase a replacement copy and the duo were sufficiently inspired to write `Hey, Schoolgirl' together. Recording as Tom and Jerry, they scored a minor hit. But Simon's double bass player father, Louis, thought popular music was dumb and hoped a place at Brooklyn Law College would steer his son straight.
But writing early material like `Play Me a Sad Song' convinced Simon to quit after one term and try his luck as a solo artist. No mention is made of his excursions as Jerry Landis, Paul Kane or True Taylor, but we do get to hear about him discovering Bob Dylan and deciding that he also needed to start writing grown-up songs. A wonderful rendition of `The Sound of Silence' follows, as Simon reveals how he used to record in the family bathroom with the tiles and the water in the bath producing a unique sonic ambience.
Back in his home studio, Simon explains how the concept for the new album came via a series of dreams and a guitar motif that moved wife Edie Brickell. The loss of the hearing in his left ear turned the process into a challenge to be accepted and Simon continued to experiment on a new sound with co-producer Kyle Grisham. Yet, he didn't know what he was searching for and had to be patient for the lyrics to come to him when he wasn't expecting them.
Still working alone back in 1964, Simon was encouraged by producer Tom Wilson at Columbia Records to reunite with Garfunkel for Wednesday Morning, 3AM. However, the album flopped and Simon took refuge with Judith Piepe in an East End bedsit, fell in love with 18 year-old Essex girl, Kathy Chitty, and played London folk clubs. He recorded The Paul Simon Songbook, with `Kathy's Song' reflecting his conviction that his heart lay in England.
Without Simon's knowledge, Wilson added electric guitar, bass, and drums to `The Sound of Silence' and it reached No.1 in the US. He tells Gibney he wasn't bothered by the change, but he knew his life was about to shift, especially when Wilson left CBS and engineer Roy Halee became their new studio collaborator. Archive footage shows Simon and Garfunkel working together and it's contrasted with shots of Simon, Grisham, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis refining the new material.
A segment follows on Halee's ingenuity in getting the pair to sing into a single microphone to get their distinctive synchronicity. However, he also came up with the tape loops under-riffing `Cecilia' and suggested the use of an echo chamber for `The Only Living Boy in New York', He also recorded the drum at the end of `The Boxer' down an elevator shaft and latched on to the slight out-of-synchness of two locked 8-track desks to create the percussion sound at the end of `Bridge Over Troubled Water'.
A Dick Cavett interview provides the hook for a reminiscence about Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967) and how `Mrs Robinson' was made up on the spot to fill the scene of the car speeding towards the church. Mel Brooks told Simon that the song had plagued him because he was married to Anne Bancroft and everyone sang it to her wherever they went.
The same year, Simon and Garfunkel closed the first night of the Monterey Pop Festival and Simon recalls how they were considered square alongside The Who and Jimi Hendrix. This prompted them to make Songs of America (1969), in which they presented what they deemed the self-evident truths about the state of the nation and discovered that not everyone in America is a liberal. The conversations between the pair, filmed during their 1969 tour, suggest the strain that would lead to the parting of the ways the following year. In separate voiceovers, they tell their side of the story, with Simon admitting jealousy over applause for Garfunkel's singing when he wrote the songs and did all the studio stuff and Garfunkel admitting that he felt he could dip back into the duo between movies like Nichols's Catch-22 (1970). He claims it took two for them to be jerks, but the toll of five years of intense togetherness had placed a strain on their friendship, which was no longer a good enough reason for the combo to continue.
Some of the shots of Simon's eyes from that period, whether on stage or in the studio, suggest how egotistical he could be. But they also testify to a fragility that he was forced to confront when his hearing went. A passage explores the medical solutions he sought and the impact that the sudden silence had on his ability to sing. Marsalis had advised him to keep the odd missed note in the recordings, as they were very poignant and reinforced the album's sense of struggle with belief. But the perfectionist wanted things to be just right and the way he deals with classical musicians playing during some New York sessions reveal both the demands that Simon makes on others, but also himself.
Wife Peggy Harper told Simon he had nothing to fear from going solo, after he had been warned by CBS chief, Clive Davis, that splitting from Garfunkel would be a calamity. Brickell backs the notion that Garfunkel walked away to be a film star and Simon admits his signing on to do Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge (1971) without telling him was the straw that broke the camel's recording contact'. Brickell resented being told not to date Simon because he was arrogant and she backs up his contention that he went solo because he wasn't given much choice in the matter.
Having included Los Incas on `El Cóndor Pasa (If I Could)', Simon wanted to put a ska spin on `Mother and Child Reunion' and went to record in Jamaica. However, Toots and the Maytals persuaded him to do a reggae arrangement and he has since dabbled in world music because it's not fair to get session musicians to attempt other people's handwriting. But Simon was ready to reach out to other audiences, hence his appearances on Saturday Night Live after becoming friends with Lorne Michaels. In addition to doing new songs like `Still Crazy After All These Years', he also did a basketball sketch with Connie Hawk (who towered above him) and a duet on `Here Comes the Sun' and `Homeward Bound' with George Harrison.
Another Beatle, John Lennon, turned up on stage with Simon at the 1975 Grammys to present the award for Best Record. Art Garfunkel came to collect the prize for Olivia Newton-John's `I Honestly Love You' and the pair traded barbs through clenched teeth, as Lennon found it all wince-inducingly amusing. Looking back, Simon calls fame `a poison' and admits to finding some 70s situations difficult in retrospect. Cavett asks him about how celebrity and wealth have changed him, but he rather ducks the question, only to provide an answer in `American Tune', which he's seen performing on TV with intercuts to images of Vietnam and Watergate that so altered the US's opinion of itself in the mid-1970s and retain their potency in a new age of uncertainty.
Back in the studio, Marsalis listens to the new tracks and takes notes and jokes about Simon's maxim, `the ear goes to the irritant', as he will always spot things that he feels he needs to work on. As the words and music seem to come so easily, it's almost as if he has to struggle over incidentals to make up for it. Simon agrees that he goes through phases of loving and loathing with every song as it develops and he hates it when other people ask him to listen to something, as he's not good at polite compliments.
Despite enjoying the experience of writing and directing One Trick Pony (1980), Simon was floored by its failure, as he felt he had let so many people down. As a consequence, he sought to bounce back by inviting Art Garfunkel to join him in a concert in Central Park in 1981. It was such a success - despite someone jumping the stage during `The Late Great Johnny Ace' - that the duo toured again and agreed to record Hearts and Bones (1983) together. However, Garfunkel wanted to work out his harmonies while walking in Switzerland and Simon felt so disenchanted that he wiped the vocals - but still invited him to his wedding to Carrie Fisher. This actually took place during the tour, with Fisher coming on stage to joke about the crowd being on their honeymoon. But his inability to cope with her media bubble meant that they parted after half a year and Fisher's josh about being more useful for material than as a wife was rather borne out by the lyrics to `Hearts and Bones'.
Things worked out better with Edie Brickell, who blew a song with The New Bohemians on SNL when she saw Simon standing next to a camera. Although he was 25 years older at 47, they clicked and remain together, with Brickell contributing vocals on Seven Psalms and joining him in a Houston church when he recorded Voces8 in a session that reminded him of his time in South Africa (so there's no allusion here to the 2014 Norwalk Superior Court appearance after the couple were arrested on disorderly conduct charges by officers investigating a family dispute at their home).
This takes us neatly into Graceland (1986), Simon's seventh solo album, which was engineered by Roy Halee (who is still going at the age of 90). We see footage of them working with Black musicians on `The Boy in the Bubble', `I Know What I Know', and `Graceland', although these were just backing tracks for unwritten lyrics and Simon explains how he felt drawn to Memphis to understand why the name of Elvis's home fitted the vibe so well.
On receiving his Grammy for Album of the Year, Simon addressed the criticism he had received for defying the anti-apartheid boycott. But the presence of Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba on his tour went some way to drawing the sting, as they lauded him for being so moved by South African music that he wanted to work with those who played it. Moreover, they joined him on stage in Harare, with Makeba duetting on `Under African Skies' and Simon being taken aback when the force of the applause from the integrated crowd caused him to play `You Can Call Me Al' twice in a row.
The West African drumming at the end of `Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes' led him to Brazilian Milton Nascimento, who collaborated with him on The Rhythm of the Saints (1990). We see live footage of `The Obvious Child' and `The Cool, Cool River', but the journey ends there, with nothing said about the six studio albums to 2018. Instead, Simon and Gibney content themselves with the vocal performance on `Wait' and how this is a statement from someone who isn't yet prepared to acquiesce in the sound of silence.
After 209 minutes of excellence, it seems ungrateful to feel short-changed. But a quarter of a century and a over third of Simon's solo output has been overlooked. Was that Gibney's decision or his subject's? Maybe there will be room for a last verse in a five-hour TV edit, but one rather suspects not - which is a shame, as this would otherwise be as definitive as Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty profile or Martin Scorsese's films on Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and George Harrison.
Editor Andy Grieve merits mention for weaving the footage into such a fascinating portrait, although the amount time spent on Graceland seems somewhat disproportionate given that the later Simon and Garfunkel albums and some of Simon's early solo work go unreferenced in being shuffled into the blend. While this is very much an intimate study and one that rightly makes the most of such unique access, it takes Simon's significance as read, when it might have been nice to hear something about his musical and cultural status from a critical standpoint and about his influence/legacy from some big name artists in his debt. A word from musician son Harper Simon might not have gone amiss, either.
But it's always easy to nitpick in these situations and Gibney has done a splendid job in chronicling the key moments in a fabled career. He even includes Simon's appearances on The Muppet Show, when Miss Piggy sang `Scarborough Fair' out of tune. Interestingly, Simon's turn as Tony Lacey in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) is not revisited after the opening montage, perhaps because the caricature cut a tad too close? Certainly, Gibney seems reluctant to delve deeply into Simon's personality, his philosophies, and his foibles and noticeably leaves the more awkward questions to chat show hosts Dick Cavett and David Letterman. He could point to the film's subtitle and shrug, but the man is so evidently central to the music that the lack of insight feels like an abnegation.
Simon has often come across awkwardly on camera down the years. Yet, even though the voice can sometimes sound a little frail, he seems at peace with himself in his homely studio, despite wrestling with such big issues as belief and mortality in what one can only hope is not his 15th and final album. And that is very much to the credit of Gibney and his crew. Perhaps they could do Ringo Starr next, as his post-Beatle odyssey is well worth exploring, especially as he's busier than ever.
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