The Kid Stays in the Picture; I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is riveting whenever director Sam Jones captures the Wilco-mates in a boy-boy power struggle, but he winds up simply documenting the band's trumping one record label for another. When Warner's Reprise disliked Wilco's self-produced tapes of the Yankee Foxtrot Hotel album, the band's contract was canceled, allowing Wilco to make a new deal at Warner's Nonesuch. A voiceover describes the maneuver as "The coup of all time for us to get one of the biggest entertainment corporations in the world to release us from a contract?scot-free?with the record that they had already paid for and then sell it back to them for three times the money. They disliked the record so much they paid for it twice!"
Robert Evans isn't crass enough to talk money. In The Kid, Evans heroicizes himself as a modern Hollywood disciple. After an accidental, insignificant career as a movie actor in the 1950s, he became head of production at Paramount Pictures in the late 60s and early 70s. Evans wears the mythology that has accrued to that era like a fond old leisure suit. (Like Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, this is conceived for movie-sated nincompoops.) As Evans narrates the film (after his 1999 published autobiography), he alone is responsible for such films as Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather and Chinatown. Re-read that list. The stinker is Love Story, which suggests that there was not a guiding intelligence common to all those box-office hits. But in hindsight, Evans has the Hollywood honcho's gall to take inordinate credit for hits and dismiss the misses. He doesn't divulge his true Hollywood legacy?the packaging of mass entertainment that began with the Paramount-sponsored novels Love Story and The Godfather. He takes credit for the films alone, continuing the misinformed notion that those movies were ingeniously popular and not commercially created media events. (That The Godfather films turned out to be works of art is Coppola's good fortune, a matter Evans doesn't go near.) The Kid itself is a prefabricated media event to which the directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein apply clever technique. But the animated stills and manipulated archive photos are no substitute for a serious documentarian's inquiring verisimilitude.
A vanity production, The Kid was produced by Vanity Fair's E. Graydon Carter. It has the whiff of Tina, but by now that's just the accepted mode of media celebrity worship from VF to E!'s True Hollywood Story. We're meant simply to enjoy Evans' roue recall, and to the extent that we do?he narrates in a garrulous, growly voice?it's embarrassingly entertaining. You can practically smell the off-camera cigar staining his lips. But while Evans fits himself into L.B. Mayer and Jack Warner's jackboots, our admiration of the good films he was involved with distracts our disdain for the untold crap he foisted on the American public?from Love Story to Marathon Man to Sliver. It's funny to hear Evans describe Roman Polanski as "That little polack, he was the biggest man I ever met!" But the combination of vulgarity and disingenuousness makes The Kid a discomfiting experience. What is the truth here? It seems plain from the innuendo and scandal-laden narration that 30s diva Norma Shearer was probably picking up young meat at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool when she happened upon the neophyte Evans, presumably thinking to cast him in a movie as her late husband, MGM producer Irving Thalberg, and thus beginning Evans' career. The non-disclosure is Evans' one moment of gallantry.
For Sam Jones, Wilco represents the valiant indie-rock movement eager to justify its acquiescence to the mainstream. His film's heartbreak title promises a tale about common, unsettling, All-American dissension among bandmates?as when Wilco's songwriter and lead singer Jeff Tweedy fires guitarist Jay Bennett. But this everyday nightmare is virtually ignored. One bandmember coldly reconciles Bennett's departure, saying, "Our friendship had run its course." That's a Reagan-Clinton legacy for sure, but Jones lets it pass.
I think of Wilco as the band Winona Ryder touted to Jay Leno ("Which band-member was she fucking?" a friend asked during the broadcast). I had yawned at Wilco's first incarnation as Uncle Tupelo and played their Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg only once. A postpunk band like David Gedge's Cinerama is more my taste; Wilco seems to be a peculiarly bland, sexless alternative. And yet, I went willingly to a screening of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart and since then, only one thing has been in my head: the incidental info that Warner paid Wilco $85,000 to make Yankee Foxtrot Hotel. This fact of yuppie commerce (Is that all rock bands get from mega-cartels?) is more compelling than any of Jeff Tweedy's lyrics?and certainly more fascinating than his drab, uninspired alto.
?
One doesn't respond simply to these two movies but to the culture of celebrity worship perpetuated by what used to be called New Hollywood and is now praised as Alt-Rock. Both are business as usual. Both are banal. I appreciate that these projects were actually shot on film, and it's truly wonderful to see Morgan and Burstein manipulate pop imagery so imaginatively. (Their model must be Quincy Jones' 1990 ego-stroke Listen Up.) Plus, Sam Jones captures Wilco's hometown Chicago in delicate black-and-white cityscapes that seep into your consciousness, richer than the accompanying folk-rock. But since these are documentaries, it's unacceptable that one walks out of them with more questions than satisfaction. Too much is left to conjecture, too much new information about the cruel heart of showbusiness is overlooked.
Both these films prove how today's pop audience is bound to the deceptions of fame. The more mountebanks like Michael Bay and Ron Howard and Ridley Scott and Lenny Kravitz commandeer the culture, the less encouragement we get to think for ourselves. Robert Evans' narcissism and Wilco's industry satisfaction are dangerously misleading. These films tempt us to enjoy their subjects' prosperity too much. Neither film gets us closer to understanding movies or music as art.
Funny how the opening bar of Wilco's "I Got You" sounds a lot like Bryan Ferry's cover of Dobie Gray's "The In Crowd," yet never turns into r&b or Ferry's funky chic. It's a good bet that the all-white crowd of Wilco fans we see cheering the live performances in the film has never heard the Ferry or Gray "In Crowd"s, yet they enthusiastically inhabit an impoverished culture?bobbing their heads to a Midwestern hick version of Belle and Sebastian. (Pure fatuousness.) And yet Tweedy seems such a nice guy in his schlubby, Tobey Maguire way. I feel so bad about his migraines that I wish I liked his music more. Above all, I wish Sam Jones had been there when Elvis Costello made This Year's Model, Public Enemy made Fear of a Black Planet, Nirvana made "Heart Shaped Box" (nothing else), when Timbaland made "Luv 2 Luv U" and Jay-Z made his masterpiece The Blueprint.
For me, the funniest part of The Kid was not the montage of Evans' whore-mongering (Camilla Sparv, Joan Collins, etc.) but the single clip from Love Story of his future ex-wife Ali McGraw's abominable, Oscar-nominated performance. (Does anyone remember that Paramount's influence was so great The New York Times put Love Story on its 10-best list?) Yankee Foxtrot Hotel doesn't deserve the attention Jones gives. He shows tension between Tweedy and Bennett but implies Tweedy's subsequent vomiting results from other than sheer egotism and disgust. Jones accepts stardom without question: we see only Tweedy sign Wilco's new Nonesuch contract, because the band's not a cooperative. Tweedy alone owns it.
By implication, Tweedy and Evans also own our fantasies of what it means to be artists. Struggle to reject these films, which worship power in the guise of appraising truth.