Review All Digs Bill Evans – Delve into the turbulent world of the great jazz man | film

TElusive, ruminative and highly entertaining, his film presents its successive scenes like a series of unresolved strings carrying the listener on a destinationless journey – and is, incidentally, one of those rare films with a great supporting role that neither undermines nor overrides the rest. It’s a movie about music. In particular, what is left when a musician can no longer play and is left to contemplate the terrible sacrifices that are made, without conscious consent, to this all-consuming profession that creates familial pain and jealousy as an almost toxic byproduct. It’s a drama that brings to mind Glenn Gould and Hilary du Pré, Jacqueline’s sister.

Screenwriter Mark O’Halloran adapted Owen Martell’s 2013 novel Intermission, about the famous jazz pianist Bill Evans. It focuses on a period of emotional devastation for Evans, when music wasn’t possible—perhaps a restorative break, perhaps the beginning of a disastrous new drought—when his close friend and bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car accident in his twenties.

The director is Grant Gee, who directed the wonderful documentary Innocence of Memories about Orhan Pamuk. Cinematographer Pierce McGrail shot the film in smoky, high-contrast monochrome, switching to garish color for three quick takes in 1973, 1979, and 1980; These show three other deaths, including Evans’s, each of which Lavarro was the lead in, and each of which is attributed to his musical career.

Anders Danielsen-Lee plays Evans as a gaunt and awkward character, his reserve heightened by sadness. A person whose spectacles rest on a face too thin to support them, a smoker always on the verge of disappearing under the gauze of cigarette smoke. He is a heroin addict, dependent on his girlfriend, Elaine Schultz (Fallen Kane); This habit now had a greater chance of ruining his life. His worried brother, Harry (Barry Ward), comes to Bill’s chaotic New York apartment and asks him to stay with him, his wife, and his young daughter. But he soon decides that Bill’s mere presence poses a risk to his precarious mental health, and sends him away to seek respite therapy with his elderly parents, who now live in sunny Florida, where the sun’s rays create a scorching white off-screen.

His mother, Mary, is played by Laurie Metcalfe, while Bill Pullman gives a great performance as Evans’ sweet but evil father. A talkative old man drives his son around his chic new neighborhood (they hail from Plainfield, New Jersey), delighted by his son’s fame and burgeoning leisure time. While driving, he was given to dull Rabbit Angstrom-style monologues about the way the country was going: “Look at the Kennedys. The Irish take over. But never any of the Welsh. That’s because we never suffered. It’s our punishment.”

But the shocking truth is that Bill’s brother, Harry Jr., and perhaps even his father, are jealous of him – especially Harry Jr., a music teacher who aspires to be a musician, is painfully aware of his inferiority and is prone to depression and mental illness. Harry Jr. is better than Bill at golf (his father is also a great golfer) but that is no consolation.

Harry Sr. comes close to telling him how the working life that now pays for this comfortable new existence in Florida has been a bleak prison. Maybe he also wanted to be an artist, or just something other than what he was; Something that would require an artist’s talent to imagine. But when Bill returns to New York he finds old problems waiting for him, especially his inability to build a meaningful relationship, and Kane takes out his terrible hurt on Ellen. Gee completely inhabits Evans’ world.