Everybody Digs Bill Evans

The legendary jazz pianist gets the biopic treatment, albeit with far less crowd-pleasing flash and far more character-based introspection, very much in keeping with the playing style of the subject and the musical idiom in which he flourished.

With consummate fluency, the plot is structured around a period in Bill Evans’s life when the perfect triangle of his band lost one of its sides with the death of his bass player, and the frustration of his family’s attempts to guide him through his grief.

The smoke and grime of 1960s New York is brilliantly evoked through Piers McGrail’s monochrome photography, whose balance of darkness and light suggests the struggle hidden beneath the character’s professional veneer, just as elements of his music hint at the melancholy beneath its smooth, articulate surface.

The film opens with a hint of that didactic authority that often characterises the documentary, its scene-setting detail telling (as opposed to showing) us where we’ll be spending the next hundred or so minutes. But there are too many artful close-ups of plucking fingers, piano keys standing to attention and cymbals being tightened in preparation for a gig for this to be genuine archive footage.

Instead, director Grant Gee establishes a conspicuous rhythm of stylistic choices, such as cleverly matched transitions and intricate compositions whose only tool is the spectrum from black to white. Thus he combines the elegance of a measured photomontage and the thematic visual poetry of early Orson Welles.

Clearly, editor Adam Biskupski has also studied Jean-Luc Godard, overlapping the particles of the story at key moments, cutting between two different scenes and flattening time in an attempt to mimic the memories of a protagonist whose mind has recently been smashed to smithereens.

Though they may be standard issue for a biopic of a jazz musician, the scenes where Evans shoots up heroin in dingy hotel rooms or domestic bathrooms are shot with unblinking clarity, reflecting him in a mirror that he doesn’t even seem to notice is there. He’s too busy stashing away needles and rinsing drops of blood from the Royal Doulton.

In relocating Evans from the stage to a banal family home, his artistic temperament is analysed with the wry detachment of a disapproving parent, rather than indulged as the un-haggled price of genius. That’s an interesting dramatic seam to mine, and rather than relegate it to the ‘origin story’ part of the narrative, the entire film is built around it.

Much as the camera is precisely trained on his impassive face, Anders Danielsen Lie resists it with the same exquisite self-control as one feels from his character’s playing. The edge of the light divides his features as if he can’t decide how he feels about the devastating loss of his bandmate – is its cost mostly personal or musical?

On the rare occasion he tries to articulate his feelings in words, he’s protected by a shroud of silhouette; his very soul seems blackened by grief. Evans is hard to like, but because he’s reserved rather than an arsehole. Danielsen Lie understands exactly how much light is on him, and whether it’s enough to catch those precious molecules of emotion in the form of seldom-shed tears.

Bill’s family, including his older brother Harry, who is found dead during one of the film’s occasional flash-forwards into the luridly coloured 1970s, are no more prone to big emotional outbursts than he is. They all want to help, but how do you help someone who won’t help himself?

Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf as his parents seem at first to be so entertainingly ordinary that you wonder how they could have sired such a sensitive exalted creature as one of the great musicians of the twentieth century. But like their son, they soon start to show chinks in their armour.

Their cosy, lived-in relationship makes a compelling contrast, and the smacked-ear sound design and Roger Goula’s primitive, percussive score manifests the music Bill can’t bring himself to make out loud. Their scenes together, as a very different trio to the one we’ve seen on stage, generate humour and tension in a raggedy, enervating dance.

Everybody may dig Bill Evans the artist, but this film is surprisingly indifferent to his actual art, except as a therapeutic device. Bill Evans the human being is a quietly fascinating mess, his life strewn about the screen with expressive cinematography, unobtrusively imaginative direction, and the kind of acting performances that have awards voters and general audiences weeping in harmony.

-Stew Mott-