As the Toronto International Film Festival winds down, a few clear patterns can be detected. A key one among them: this year saw an incredible array of music-related documentaries screening, with such marquee artists as U2, Pearl Jam, Paul McCartney and Neil Young spotlighted by equally marquee directors.
And that suggests that while music on film may not necessarily be a trend in moviemaking – although it might - there is a recognized audience for such works, potentially giving filmgoers more and exciting choices at the local megaplex. Or at the very least, on the shelves at the local DVD store.
That TIFF kicked off for the first time ever in its 36-year history with a documentary - It Might Get Loud and An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim’s From the Sky Down, which chronicled the making of U2’s 1991 album, Achtung Baby – indicates a keen embrace of the offbeat among festival programmers.
And what a film it is. As Sympatico inMovies writer Devon Scoble noted in a recent blog posting, “Achtung Baby has earned its place in the rock canon, and solidified U2’s reputation as a serious musical presence, but it almost didn’t get made. In an intimate chat at [a Toronto press conference last week] singer Bono admitted that while recording the album, the band was ‘very’ close to splitting.”
That’s real drama for you, as intense as anything you’d find in the mind of a Joel Schumacher or William Friedkin or Bruce Beresford, all acclaimed directors who also presented outstanding films at this year’s TIFF.
But U2 didn’t have any kind of lock on drama. Cameron Crowe’s documentary about Seattle sons Pearl Jam – titled Pearl Jam Twenty and made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the group’s debut album – had tragedy galore, from band- and audience-member death to lawsuits and addiction.
And it’s a great movie, too, so much so that even a so-so Pearl Jam fan like yours truly was captivated by the story and the way it was told. Sure, Crowe is an excellent and established film director (see Say Anything, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky) but it’s fair to say he wouldn’t be trailing a bunch of rockers unless he felt he had a meaningful tale to tell.
Similarly, as Rolling Stone Magazine notes, famed documentarian Albert Maysles found a fantastic tale in simply following Paul McCartney around New York City as the musician prepared for the Concert for New York benefit at Madison Square Garden on October 20th, 2001, which commemorated the 9/11 attacks.
Speaking to a TIFF press conference about his film, titled The Love We Make, the 84-year-old Maysles - the man behind the camera for the Beatles' first U.S. visit in 1964 and the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, which captured the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival – said, “There's no anger in this film. It's all an attempt to understand and to repair whatever the damage was by being so kind to these people."
And if musicians can’t help us understand emotions and spread joy, nobody can.
Last but not least, Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Journeys also screened recently at TIFF.
Though described as a disappointment by MacLean’s Magazine, which characterizes the doc as “perversely raw and lazy,” the film – the third such collaboration between the guitarist and the director – again clearly shows that Hollywood heavyweights instinctively know that musicians are legitimate and engaging source material for feature films.
