A film by Grant Gee
With: Anders Danielsen Lie, Bill Pullman, Laurie Metcalf, Isabelle Harriet, Barry Ward, Valene Kane, Katie McGrath
June 1961, NYC: legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans has found his musical voice and created the perfect trio, including bass player Scott LaFaro, said to be his soulmate through music. A residency at New York’s Village Vanguard culminates in the live taping of two of the greatest jazz records of all time in one night. Ten days later, LaFaro dies in a car crash. Numb with grief, Evans stops playing.
Our rate : ★★★
With its polished black and white cinematography, sincere homage to Bill Evans’ music, thorough and erudite approach, and polished staging with a few artistic flourishes, this is a high-quality Mubi production. Everybody Digs Bill Evans ranks alongside films such as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. It follows a style (more than an atmosphere) in which photography and the play with images play a very important role, juxtaposed with a portrait based on the artistic production and biography of an exceptional person who takes his time, insisting on one or a few slices of life. Here, as in Nebraska for Bruce Springsteen, Grant Gee seeks to focus on a period of questioning and reconstruction, a parenthesis in the life of an artist whose fame is growing, whose successes are praised by music critics, but who has a relatively weak personality, troubled by an environment that plays on his demons and draws him ever deeper into dark places where only one thing matters to him: getting high, to forget, to escape his anxieties, his shyness, his melancholy, his destroyed inner world and what resembles a mourning of himself or a depression, into which the death of his lifelong creative partner has plunged him. A stylistic exercise for Grant Gee, who relies on a technical team that is up to the task, the black and white offers striking contrasts, mirroring the artist’s state of mind, with gray smoky atmospheres following one another and going hand in hand with striking hallucinatory sequences or nightmares. The very precise staging, with its meticulous editing, follows his character, accurately recreating the jazzy interiors in which Bill Evans performed, as well as the bedrooms and living rooms in which the artist isolated himself. Everybody Digs Bill Evans is above all an atmospheric film, relying on a flawless performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, who is transformed and perfectly credible, and on a few rare sequences featuring the music of Bill Evans. In itself, the film falls short of two objectives: that of being a great film about jazz and the other side of the scene, as Blue Notes was, for example, and that of surprising us, of taking us somewhere other than the presumed mental state of its hero, who is overly reduced to his demons and withdrawn attitudes. when it seemed to us that the very subject of the film should have focused more on the musical quest, which is strangely absent, even though it goes hand in hand with the mental state, in favor of family relationships that are also presupposed and depicted from this single angle, with insistence rather than application, and a certain narrative smugness.
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