On Screen: Gorillas in the Mist and Bird

Gorillas in the Mist
Screenplay by Anna Hamilton Phelan
Directed by Michael Apted
A Universal Release

Bird
Screenplay by Joel Oliansky
Musical Direction by Lennre Niehaus
Directed by Clint Eastwood
A Warner Brothers Release

It’s a snap to dress an actor up as Einstein, put him through some pantomime of research, exile and elder statesmanship, photograph the performance, and call it the portrait of a genius. It’s also easy to see what’s wrong with the result. All that’s captured by the camera is a charmingly rumpled old man exuding Central European gemutlichkeit as he writes equations on a blackboard or shakes the hand of F.D.R. But there’s no gemutlichkeit in E=MC2. In the dramatization of the significance of a scientific discovery or the evolution of an artistic masterpiece, the superficial charm or lack of charm in the scientist’s or artist’s personality is ultimately beside the point. Yet the filmmaker cannot afford to ignore the personal characteristics of his subject. It is precisely these quirks of personality that remind us that the artist or scientist is one of us, a “fellow passenger to the grave,” as Dickens put it, and not a naked intelligence functioning on some Platonic cloud.

What a boon, then, to moviemakers is a genius like Hemingway. Impossible to show him polishing those lines that influenced three generations of writers? Yes, but just photograph Stacy Keach running with the bulls in Pamplona or boxing with toughs on a Cuban pier. It may not result in the portrait of the artistic imagination, but at least it’s a picture of what that imagination engaged. Hemingway’s antics are not at the root of his genius, but they are not utterly irrelevant to his genius the way Einstein’s love of comfortable cafes is irrelevant to his.

What still greater gift to filmmakers is Dian Fossey’s life. For here is a genius that manifested itself entirely in an activity that is sure-fire movie material: the observation and preservation of magnificent beasts. It isn’t just Fossey herself who can be the camera subject (as Hemingway is a camera subject when he’s not writing but boxing or fishing). The very workings and results of her talent can be filmed.

So can the doom to which her vocation led her. Fossey was a naturalist (not academically trained) who, under the rather casual guidance of paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, stationed herself in the central African country of Rwanda to track, observe, categorize, and (with the help of a National Geographic cameraman) record the ways of mountain gorillas, animals apparently headed towards extinction. More than 20 years of ever-increasing closeness with the animals and the ever-accelerating friction with the humans she encountered on the job — natives who killed the apes to make magic charms for themselves and souvenirs for whites, trappers who snared the beasts for European and American zoos, and government officials who had to propitiate the natives to insure peace and bargain with the Europeans to increase prosperity — made Fossey into an anthropomorphizing misanthrope.

By the end of her life, Fossey was torturing natives, kidnapping native children (to exhort cessation of the gorilla hunting), insulting officials, and threatening hunters. Her “dark romance,” as conservationist-author Harold Hayes termed it, was an obsession with the animals she loved. She had come close to foreswearing her own species by the time of her violent death: an unsolved machete murder committed by one of her numerous enemies. As is the case with most tragic heroes, Fossey’s flaws were the shadows of her virtues.

Since Hollywood filmmakers  usually compromise tragedy but are good at incorporating great documentary footage of exotic places into even the most banal of adventure stories, I expected Gorillas in the Mist to be more or less successful at presenting Fossey’s work but to turn to mush when the story required tragic depth. I was wrong. The first half of this movie, portraying Fossey’s jungle initiation and her growing mastery of the techniques of tracking, counting, and observation, is a botch. But the second, tragic half is honest and gripping.

Though the movie takes its title from Fossey’s own book and lists it in the credits as a basis for Anna Hamilton Phelan’s script, director Michael Apted and his crew have made shockingly little use of the book’s lore. The naturalist footage is all generalized foliage and humidity. Not even once does the camera zero in on some fascinating detail, some eye-opening oddity. People who view the easy-going prettiness that Apted has made of the Rwandan jungle will probably feel that it is an ideal vacation spot where nary a mosquito bites and no snake slithers. The film’s visual tone throughout is clean, temperate, unthreatening, and tidy.

Twenty-five years ago, Lawrence of Arabia didn’t start a boom in desert tourism but it did give us an inkling of the strange attraction the dessert might hold for a man as strange as T.E. Lawrence: we felt its murderous cleanness and its shifting beauty. But Gorillas presents a jungle not as Fossey must have perceived it but as the National Geographic editorial board would probably like it to be. And, remember, the National Geographic finally rejected Fossey. They didn’t share her obsessions.

Worse, the filmmakers also skimp on showing us Fossey’s methods of tracking the beasts, gaining their trust, detailing their habits. The brief passage in Hayes’s Life magazine article, recounting the discovery made by Fossey and her photographer of how the gorillas could be approached without arousing their ire or fear is much more specific than anything in the movie. And, although we may very well respond to the majesty of the apes en masse and shudder at their slaughter, we don’t get to share in Fossey’s response to individual gorillas or her perception of them as individual personalities.

We respond to our dogs and cats as idiosyncratic beings because we perceive the familiar animals up close, over a long period of time amid everyday surroundings, so that their endearing (and obnoxious) traits emerge. Since the makers of Gorillas were photographing strange animals in an exotic setting for a two hour movie, they had to compensate by careful selection of significant detail. In this, I think they failed.

But, finally, we are gripped in the film’s second half, by Fossey’s passion, her anger, her growing misanthropy. Although even this section is marred by the fact that we haven’t fully grasped the nature of Fossey’s work (and therefore can’t fully grasp the love that grew out of the work), Apted’s staging comes alive whenever the story demands sheer physical excitement.

The killings of the animals are believably brutal, Fossey’s punitive actions convincingly harsh, and her scarifying behavior towards her graduate student workers neatly indicates her growing misanthropy. And to the credit of the filmmakers, we are allowed to see not only Fossey’s point of view but that of her opponents. We aren’t so locked into her mentality that we feel only the piteousness of her death. Since we see how her right collided with the rights of her foes (the natives’ need for money and the upholding of their traditions), a feeling sterner than pathos, an inkling of tragedy, does finally emerge.

Sigourney Weaver’s performance helps. In the early scenes, I was surprised by a clumsiness of movement and amateurishness of line delivery that she has never fallen into in any of her previous roles. I suspect that in trying to show Fossey’s early “tenderfoot” quality, Weaver allowed the klutziness she was trying to portray to spill over into her acting technique, so that, occasionally, it is the actress Weaver being gauche rather than the person Fossey. But Weaver grows better as the movie improves, and she brings off both Fossey’s rages and collapses with power and complexity. It is a candid performance by an actress not afraid to be ugly when her material demands ugliness.

Gorillas in the Mist

Screenplay by Anna Hamilton Phelan

Directed by Michael Apted

A Universal Release

Bird

Screenplay by Joel Oliansky

Musical Direction by Lennre Niehaus

Directed by Clint Eastwood

A Warner Brothers Release

It’s a snap to dress an actor up as Einstein, put him through some pantomime of research, exile and elder statesmanship, photograph the performance, and call it the portrait of a genius. It’s also easy to see what’s wrong with the result. All that’s captured by the camera is a charmingly rumpled old man exuding Central European gemutlichkeit as he writes equations on a blackboard or shakes the hand of F.D.R. But there’s no gemutlichkeit in E=MC2. In the dramatization of the significance of a scientific discovery or the evolution of an artistic masterpiece, the superficial charm or lack of charm in the scientist’s or artist’s personality is ultimately beside the point. Yet the filmmaker cannot afford to ignore the personal characteristics of his subject. It is precisely these quirks of personality that remind us that the artist or scientist is one of us, a “fellow passenger to the grave,” as Dickens put it, and not a naked intelligence functioning on some Platonic cloud.

What a boon, then, to moviemakers is a genius like Hemingway. Impossible to show him polishing those lines that influenced three generations of writers? Yes, but just photograph Stacy Keach running with the bulls in Pamplona or boxing with toughs on a Cuban pier. It may not result in the portrait of the artistic imagination, but at least it’s a picture of what that imagination engaged. Hemingway’s antics are not at the root of his genius, but they are not utterly irrelevant to his genius the way Einstein’s love of comfortable cafes is irrelevant to his.

What still greater gift to filmmakers is Dian Fossey’s life. For here is a genius that manifested itself entirely in an activity that is sure-fire movie material: the observation and preservation of magnificent beasts. It isn’t just Fossey herself who can be the camera subject (as Hemingway is a camera subject when he’s not writing but boxing or fishing). The very workings and results of her talent can be filmed.

So can the doom to which her vocation led her. Fossey was a naturalist (not academically trained) who, under the rather casual guidance of paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, stationed herself in the central African country of Rwanda to track, observe, categorize, and (with the help of a National Geographic cameraman) record the ways of mountain gorillas, animals apparently headed towards extinction. More than 20 years of ever-increasing closeness with the animals and the ever-accelerating friction with the humans she encountered on the job — natives who killed the apes to make magic charms for themselves and souvenirs for whites, trappers who snared the beasts for European and American zoos, and government officials who had to propitiate the natives to insure peace and bargain with the Europeans to increase prosperity — made Fossey into an anthropomorphizing misanthrope.

By the end of her life, Fossey was torturing natives, kidnapping native children (to exhort cessation of the gorilla hunting), insulting officials, and threatening hunters. Her “dark romance,” as conservationist-author Harold Hayes termed it, was an obsession with the animals she loved. She had come close to foreswearing her own species by the time of her violent death: an unsolved machete murder committed by one of her numerous enemies. As is the case with most tragic heroes, Fossey’s flaws were the shadows of her virtues.

Since Hollywood filmmakers  usually compromise tragedy but are good at incorporating great documentary footage of exotic places into even the most banal of adventure stories, I expected Gorillas in the Mist to be more or less successful at presenting Fossey’s work but to turn to mush when the story required tragic depth. I was wrong. The first half of this movie, portraying Fossey’s jungle initiation and her growing mastery of the techniques of tracking, counting, and observation, is a botch. But the second, tragic half is honest and gripping.

Though the movie takes its title from Fossey’s own book and lists it in the credits as a basis for Anna Hamilton Phelan’s script, director Michael Apted and his crew have made shockingly little use of the book’s lore. The naturalist footage is all generalized foliage and humidity. Not even once does the camera zero in on some fascinating detail, some eye-opening oddity. People who view the easy-going prettiness that Apted has made of the Rwandan jungle will probably feel that it is an ideal vacation spot where nary a mosquito bites and no snake slithers. The film’s visual tone throughout is clean, temperate, unthreatening, and tidy.

Twenty-five years ago, Lawrence of Arabia didn’t start a boom in desert tourism but it did give us an inkling of the strange attraction the dessert might hold for a man as strange as T.E. Lawrence: we felt its murderous cleanness and its shifting beauty. But Gorillas presents a jungle not as Fossey must have perceived it but as the National Geographic editorial board would probably like it to be. And, remember, the National Geographic finally rejected Fossey. They didn’t share her obsessions.

Worse, the filmmakers also skimp on showing us Fossey’s methods of tracking the beasts, gaining their trust, detailing their habits. The brief passage in Hayes’s Life magazine article, recounting the discovery made by Fossey and her photographer of how the gorillas could be approached without arousing their ire or fear is much more specific than anything in the movie. And, although we may very well respond to the majesty of the apes en masse and shudder at their slaughter, we don’t get to share in Fossey’s response to individual gorillas or her perception of them as individual personalities.

We respond to our dogs and cats as idiosyncratic beings because we perceive the familiar animals up close, over a long period of time amid everyday surroundings, so that their endearing (and obnoxious) traits emerge. Since the makers of Gorillas were photographing strange animals in an exotic setting for a two hour movie, they had to compensate by careful selection of significant detail. In this, I think they failed.

But, finally, we are gripped in the film’s second half, by Fossey’s passion, her anger, her growing misanthropy. Although even this section is marred by the fact that we haven’t fully grasped the nature of Fossey’s work (and therefore can’t fully grasp the love that grew out of the work), Apted’s staging comes alive whenever the story demands sheer physical excitement.

The killings of the animals are believably brutal, Fossey’s punitive actions convincingly harsh, and her scarifying behavior towards her graduate student workers neatly indicates her growing misanthropy. And to the credit of the filmmakers, we are allowed to see not only Fossey’s point of view but that of her opponents. We aren’t so locked into her mentality that we feel only the piteousness of her death. Since we see how her right collided with the rights of her foes (the natives’ need for money and the upholding of their traditions), a feeling sterner than pathos, an inkling of tragedy, does finally emerge.

Sigourney Weaver’s performance helps. In the early scenes, I was surprised by a clumsiness of movement and amateurishness of line delivery that she has never fallen into in any of her previous roles. I suspect that in trying to show Fossey’s early “tenderfoot” quality, Weaver allowed the klutziness she was trying to portray to spill over into her acting technique, so that, occasionally, it is the actress Weaver               being gauche rather than the person Fossey. But Weaver grows better as the movie improves, and she brings off both Fossey’s rages and collapses with power and complexity. It is a candid performance by an actress not afraid to be ugly when her material demands ugliness.

Gorillas in the Mist is a, curiosity: a movie that rests the passion of its heroine but not the work that inspired that passion.

Flying High

Bird, Clint Eastwood’s film biography of the great jazz musician Charlie Parker, is a very flawed movie, but it succeeds precisely where Gorillas in the Mist fails: it honors both the passion and the work of its subject. Indeed, the work is portrayed much more clearly in this film than the character of the worker.

Just before the final credits appear on the screen, a title announces that “This film is dedicated to all jazz musicians everywhere,” and it’s easy to see why this movie is being generally well received by jazz critics such as Nat Hentoff. For once, this most American of musical languages isn’t being exploited merely to underline melodramatic action or to give a shot of adrenalin to an otherwise limping production. The musk is the real raison d’etre for this movie, rather than the ups and downs of Charlie Parker.

Those ups (few) and downs (many) don’t add up to anything truly dramatic on screen. This is not because a downward slide to self-destruction is in itself undramatic. If that were true, Macbeth would be a bad drama. Bird shows us a Parker who feels he can’t win but doesn’t show us the roots of his despair.

True, Parker fell into his heroin addiction when he was only an adolescent, and, as he remarks in the film, though doctors could remove his polluted blood by transfusion, they couldn’t remove his memory of the highs he experienced as he shot up. But the question remains: why were those memories so powerfully attractive to Parker? What did he lack that heroin supplied?

Eastwood’s direction is always competent and sometimes downright splendid. Yet some of his best moments have a way of begging the questions we must feel impelled to ask about Parker; some of his most bravura touches may, in fact, increase our puzzlement rather than deepen our insight. For instance, when the teen-aged Parker is given a chance to play with some experienced jazzmen and, instead of humbly blowing a few choruses and retreating, he hogs the stage with his adolescent musical gropings, the drummer removes a cymbal and flings it to the floor as a way of cutting the kid off.

This cymbal becomes a symbol as Eastwood repeats the shot of it flying through the air several times throughout the movie. This flying saucer of derision seems to be a message from the world to Parker that he is doomed to rejection. But why, given the acclaim that Parker achieves with his skill, should the feeling persist? I’m not so naive as to think that worldly success can ever wholly mitigate a deep spiritual wound suffered early in life, but Bird never shows us Parker’s spiritual wounds, only the dissipation to which those wounds drove him.

Could early poverty have so scarred Parker that he could never be whole again? The magnificently staged introductory sequence gives the lie to this idea. Eastwood shows us the child Parker riding around his parents’ squalid Kansas farm while tooting on a primitive woodwind. The camera follows the child as he rides from left to right. After a brief fade-to-black, this movement is repeated in the very next shot as, years later, the adolescent Parker is practicing on a sax as he walks from left to right on his parents’ porch past several young black men (kin? friends?) too sunk in despair to pay attention to the music. He strides past them proudly feeling his growing mastery of his instrument. Another fade to black. Then the camera again pans from left to right in a jazz club and comes to rest on the adult Parker up on the bandstand, a full-blown and full-blowing genius of the alto sax.

It’s a marvelous sequence and shows that Eastwood can plan and execute a cinematic idea as well as any director alive. The idea is that of artistry triumphing over the misfortune of poverty. But was there something in this poverty that Parker, in fact, couldn’t shake? Some worm of despair that coiled in his belly for the rest of his days?

Or was it the injustice of racial prejudice that finally brought him low? Or the self-vampirism of an artist who must tap his own worst memories to feed his art? The presence of Dizzy Gillespie, another black genius of jazz, in the film discounts these possibilities. Shrewdly embodied by Samuel E. Wright, Gillespie comes across as a monument both of black pride (though not fanaticism) and of genial sanity.

In the best-written scene in the film, Gillespie has an intimate exchange with Parker in which Dizzy both warmly empathizes with Bird and yet firmly detaches himself from his pal’s destiny. He says, “I’m a reformer, you’re a martyr… . If they [the white establishment] succeed in killing me, it won’t be because I helped them.” This scene tells us much more about the strength of Gillespie than the doom of Parker, yet Parker is supposed to be the center of the film.

It is difficult to come to terms with Forrest Whitaker’s performance as Bird. On the one hand, he’s probably the only actor alive who can play the part since he has the right physique, the exact combination of ferocity and teddy-bearishness, and the right glassy-eyed look that says I-might-be-damned-but-I’m-not-going-to-waste-much-time-thinking-about-it.

Throughout the movie, however, Whitaker commits the same mistake that Sigourney Weaver committed in the first half-hour of Gorillas: he allows a personality trait of the person he’s playing to smudge his performance. Bird’s strange, nearly infantile geniality was a distinct characteristic that must be captured by his impersonator. But Whitaker overdoes it, slurring so many of his lines and slouching about so much and so monotonously that he fails to give many of his scenes any tension, fails to build them to a climax. Eastwood, too, must be faulted for not keeping the total arc of Whitaker’s performance in mind. Film actors have enough trouble achieving individual moments; directors must be responsible for the way the moments add up.

Diane Venora’s performance as Chan, Bird’s wife, does add up. It is a rich portrait of a woman who has spent her girlhood flirting with folly —”I was born to drive men to despair,” she boasts to Parker before they marry — and then, having married herself to trouble, grows in dignity and compassion.

The other great performances are technical: the superb cinematography and musical direction by, respectively, Jack Green and Lennie Niehaus. Green has been faulted by critics for using too much darkness in too many scenes. I disagree. Rather he creates a context of darkness (jazzmen, after all, live and work by night) out of which he then carves startling images of light. There is a shot in Parker’s nearly pitch-black apartment of suddenly illuminated Venetian blinds that I may never forget. It conveys a feeling of a stirring world outside that can no longer reach the apartment’s tenant, who has curled up in the cocoon of self.

For Bird, the only true emotional release was in those late night jam sessions in which he and his colleagues invented a new form of jazz: bebop. It is one of the few artistic discoveries that can be shown right on film, for it was a discovery made by a relatively small group of men working together in high-intensity sessions. Using skillfully recreated musical moments cleverly combined, Eastwood might have shown an artform’s evolution. Instead, he treats Parker’s progress in the same way Gorillas treats Fossey’s. First, we see the clumsy novice; then a very few moments later we are presented with a master. That’s a big jump.

Nevertheless, the results of the innovation are in this film, even if we don’t get to see its birthpangs. Lennie Niehaus’s soundtrack is Bird‘s pulse. Niehaus took old recordings of Parker, digitally re-recorded Bird’s improvisations, replaced the old accompaniments with fresh backgrounds (but with too many strings, for my taste) composed by himself, and assigned the various parts to expert contemporary musicians familiar with Parker’s style. Thus, players who were only children when Parker died, now get to play with him, or, at least, with his electronic ghost.

To my inexperienced ears, the result is like a great painting, dimmed by time and dirt, faithfully restored. I have listened to two of the original cuts that Niehaus started with: “Ko-Ko” and “Parker’s Mood.” They are satisfying still, but they would have been on the wrong level of sound for the rest of a brightly engineered film soundtrack. Therefore, Niehaus’s work doesn’t strike me as a piece of slickness, but a real necessity.

In the end, Bird does for Charlie just the opposite of what Gorillas in the Mist does for Fossey. It fails to illuminate the jazzman’s tragedy, but it is beautiful homage to his work.

Gorillas in the Mist is a, curiosity: a movie that rests the passion of its heroine but not the work that inspired that passion.

 

Flying High

Bird, Clint Eastwood’s film biography of the great jazz musician Charlie Parker, is a very flawed movie, but it succeeds precisely where Gorillas in the Mist fails: it honors both the passion and the work of its subject. Indeed, the work is portrayed much more clearly in this film than the character of the worker.

Just before the final credits appear on the screen, a title announces that “This film is dedicated to all jazz musicians everywhere,” and it’s easy to see why this movie is being generally well received by jazz critics such as Nat Hentoff. For once, this most American of musical languages isn’t being exploited merely to underline melodramatic action or to give a shot of adrenalin to an otherwise limping production. The musk is the real raison d’etre for this movie, rather than the ups and downs of Charlie Parker.

Those ups (few) and downs (many) don’t add up to anything truly dramatic on screen. This is not because a downward slide to self-destruction is in itself undramatic. If that were true, Macbeth would be a bad drama. Bird shows us a Parker who feels he can’t win but doesn’t show us the roots of his despair.

True, Parker fell into his heroin addiction when he was only an adolescent, and, as he remarks in the film, though doctors could remove his polluted blood by transfusion, they couldn’t remove his memory of the highs he experienced as he shot up. But the question remains: why were those memories so powerfully attractive to Parker? What did he lack that heroin supplied?

Eastwood’s direction is always competent and sometimes downright splendid. Yet some of his best moments have a way of begging the questions we must feel impelled to ask about Parker; some of his most bravura touches may, in fact, increase our puzzlement rather than deepen our insight. For instance, when the teen-aged Parker is given a chance to play with some experienced jazzmen and, instead of humbly blowing a few choruses and retreating, he hogs the stage with his adolescent musical gropings, the drummer removes a cymbal and flings it to the floor as a way of cutting the kid off.

This cymbal becomes a symbol as Eastwood repeats the shot of it flying through the air several times throughout the movie. This flying saucer of derision seems to be a message from the world to Parker that he is doomed to rejection. But why, given the acclaim that Parker achieves with his skill, should the feeling persist? I’m not so naive as to think that worldly success can ever wholly mitigate a deep spiritual wound suffered early in life, but Bird never shows us Parker’s spiritual wounds, only the dissipation to which those wounds drove him.

Could early poverty have so scarred Parker that he could never be whole again? The magnificently staged introductory sequence gives the lie to this idea. Eastwood shows us the child Parker riding around his parents’ squalid Kansas farm while tooting on a primitive woodwind. The camera follows the child as he rides from left to right. After a brief fade-to-black, this movement is repeated in the very next shot as, years later, the adolescent Parker is practicing on a sax as he walks from left to right on his parents’ porch past several young black men (kin? friends?) too sunk in despair to pay attention to the music. He strides past them proudly feeling his growing mastery of his instrument. Another fade to black. Then the camera again pans from left to right in a jazz club and comes to rest on the adult Parker up on the bandstand, a full-blown and full-blowing genius of the alto sax.

It’s a marvelous sequence and shows that Eastwood can plan and execute a cinematic idea as well as any director alive. The idea is that of artistry triumphing over the misfortune of poverty. But was there something in this poverty that Parker, in fact, couldn’t shake? Some worm of despair that coiled in his belly for the rest of his days?

Or was it the injustice of racial prejudice that finally brought him low? Or the self-vampirism of an artist who must tap his own worst memories to feed his art? The presence of Dizzy Gillespie, another black genius of jazz, in the film discounts these possibilities. Shrewdly embodied by Samuel E. Wright, Gillespie comes across as a monument both of black pride (though not fanaticism) and of genial sanity.

In the best-written scene in the film, Gillespie has an intimate exchange with Parker in which Dizzy both warmly empathizes with Bird and yet firmly detaches himself from his pal’s destiny. He says, “I’m a reformer, you’re a martyr. . . . If they [the white establishment] succeed in killing me, it won’t be because I helped them.” This scene tells us much more about the strength of Gillespie than the doom of Parker, yet Parker is supposed to be the center of the film.

It is difficult to come to terms with Forrest Whitaker’s performance as Bird. On the one hand, he’s probably the only actor alive who can play the part since he has the right physique, the exact combination of ferocity and teddy-bearishness, and the right glassy-eyed look that says I-might-be-damned-but-I’m-not-going-to-waste-much-time-thinking-about-it.

Throughout the movie, however, Whitaker commits the same mistake that Sigourney Weaver committed in the first half-hour of Gorillas: he allows a personality trait of the person he’s playing to smudge his performance. Bird’s strange, nearly infantile geniality was a distinct characteristic that must be captured by his impersonator. But Whitaker overdoes it, slurring so many of his lines and slouching about so much and so monotonously that he fails to give many of his scenes any tension, fails to build them to a climax. Eastwood, too, must be faulted for not keeping the total arc of Whitaker’s performance in mind. Film actors have enough trouble achieving individual moments; directors must be responsible for the way the moments add up.

Diane Venora’s performance as Chan, Bird’s wife, does add up. It is a rich portrait of a woman who has spent her girlhood flirting with folly — “I was born to drive men to despair,” she boasts to Parker before they marry — and then, having married herself to trouble, grows in dignity and compassion.

The other great performances are technical: the superb cinematography and musical direction by, respectively, Jack Green and Lennie Niehaus. Green has been faulted by critics for using too much darkness in too many scenes. I disagree. Rather he creates a context of darkness (jazzmen, after all, live and work by night) out of which he then carves startling images of light. There is a shot in Parker’s nearly pitch-black apartment of suddenly illuminated Venetian blinds that I may never forget. It conveys a feeling of a stirring world outside that can no longer reach the apartment’s tenant, who has curled up in the cocoon of self.

For Bird, the only true emotional release was in those late night jam sessions in which he and his colleagues invented a new form of jazz: bebop. It is one of the few artistic discoveries that can be shown right on film, for it was a discovery made by a relatively small group of men working together in high-intensity sessions. Using skillfully recreated musical moments cleverly combined, Eastwood might have shown an artform’s evolution. Instead, he treats Parker’s progress in the same way Gorillas treats Fossey’s. First, we see the clumsy novice; then a very few moments later we are presented with a master. That’s a big jump.

Nevertheless, the results of the innovation are in this film, even if we don’t get to see its birthpangs. Lennie Niehaus’s soundtrack is Bird‘s pulse. Niehaus took old recordings of Parker, digitally re-recorded Bird’s improvisations, replaced the old accompaniments with fresh backgrounds (but with too many strings, for my taste) composed by himself, and assigned the various parts to expert contemporary musicians familiar with Parker’s style. Thus, players who were only children when Parker died, now get to play with him, or, at least, with his electronic ghost.

To my inexperienced ears, the result is like a great painting, dimmed by time and dirt, faithfully restored. I have listened to two of the original cuts that Niehaus started with: “Ko-Ko” and “Parker’s Mood.” They are satisfying still, but they would have been on the wrong level of sound for the rest of a brightly engineered film soundtrack. Therefore, Niehaus’s work doesn’t strike me as a piece of slickness, but a real necessity.

In the end, Bird does for Charlie just the opposite of what Gorillas in the Mist does for Fossey. It fails to illuminate the jazzman’s tragedy, but it is beautiful homage to his work.

Author

  • Richard Alleva

    At the time he wrote this review, Richard Alleva was a free-lance writer living in Washington D.C. He still works as a film critic for publications such as Commonweal today.

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