Everybody certainly does dig Bill Evans in Everybody Digs Bill Evans, but nobody quite knows what the hell to do with him. The year is 1961, and the jazz legend (played flawlessly by Norway’s Anders Danielsen Lie) is firmly in the grip of a raging heroin addiction, having acquired a taste for the destructive street drug made inexplicably romantic in postwar boho circles. For musicians like Evans, who felt their almost supernatural talent was more of a curse than a blessing, the degradation that addiction entailed — the poverty, the nodding out, the humiliation at the hands of dealers — was part of the appeal, leading his biographer to describe his lifelong drug use as “the longest suicide in history.”
Grant Gee’s extraordinary, intimate and gloriously experimental film largely takes place in the summer of ’61, when Bob Dylan was still a complete unknown, the ’60s had yet to become the swinging ’60s, and New York City still looked like a glum, gray outtake from the urban ’50s. Shooting these scenes in black and white only adds to the smoky, after-hours ambience, and the opening scenes of Evans and his trio recording their seminal album Sunday at the Village Vanguard are transcendent and hypnotic in their stripped-down beauty.
A month after this, Evans’s bass player, the fantastically talented Scott LaFaro, is found dead at the age of 25, killed in a car accident, and Evans is in a near-catatonic state, having split up with his similarly addicted partner Ellaine (Valene Kane). At least, this is what his brother Harry Evans Jr. (Barry Ward) finds when he comes to visit him. “Your clothes are hanging off you, Bill,” says Harry, but they aren’t Bill’s clothes — they belonged to Scott. Wearing them seems to be some form of communion with the dead man, whose sublime inspiration he cannot, and never will, put into words. “Pure instinct, I guess.”
Harry persuades Bill to stay with him and his wife Pat, making up a makeshift bed on the sofa in the lounge, where their excitable little girl Debby is oblivious to his awkward moments of drug-induced torpor. Whether or not Harry knows that Bill is using, or if he even knows what heroin is back in 1961, is left open to question, but it soon becomes clear that Harry — who, it soon turns out, is concealing some very serious mental health issues of his own — cannot handle the extra burden. “I thought I could help him,” he says. “But I can’t.”
Kicking the problem down the road, Harry sends Bill to Florida, where his parents Mary (Laurie Metcalf) and Harry Sr. (Bill Pullman) have moved to live out their retirement. There are shades of the Jack Kerouac story here, as Evans finds a strange comfort in the folksy mundanity of their lives, which even they cheerfully describe as monotone and uneventful. With their support and without them even knowing, he comes off heroin, secretly going cold turkey while his naïve but ever-watchful mother looks for signs of the return of a recent bout of hepatitis.
The peculiar genius of Gee’s film is that this is where the bulk of the story plays out, the skeletal, cerebral jazz wunderkind (then just 32) at sharp odds with his warm, caring parents, played quite wonderfully by Metcalfe and Pullman in dry but very funny scenes reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch. More complex is his relationship with Harry Jr., who, despite being jealous of his younger brother’s late-developing talent, refuses to let him crash and burn (“I can’t sit here and watch you make nothin’ out of somethin’,” he says, exasperated). In that respect, Harry Sr. is another, less likely inspiration, when he drunkenly confides to Bill that the move to Florida was premature, a mistake that he will always regret.
Jazz-wise, there’s next to no inside baseball here, but when there is, it lands. Playing golf, Evans jokes, “I can still swing, despite what the papers say,” and when asked about his work with the mercurial Miles Davis he sidesteps with a catty retort — “He’s a great musician, that’s all I’ll say” (now that would be a film). But this isn’t about jazz, or even music, as much as it is about art. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Bill Evans is the elephant in his family’s sitting room as they try to steer him back towards creativity.
“Sometimes an intermission is part of the music,” says Mary, echoing the sentiment of John Cage’s “4’ 33”, the ne plus ultra of minimalist art statements, and this dichotomy is what Gee’s film is all about. Where does the magic come from? And where does it go? The latter is alluded to in several color sections that seem wholly unconnected but make a lot of sense after the fact; like Gee’s perceptive doc about Joy Division, the highly influential Manchester post-punk band of the late ’70s, Everybody Digs Bill Evans is about the ordinary that feeds the extraordinary and leaves us to figure out the rest for ourselves.
Title: Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Grant Gee
Screenwriter: Mark O’Halloran
Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Bill Pullman, Laurie Metcalf, Barry Ward, Valene Kane
Sales: Mister Smith (World)/CAA (US)
Running time: 1 hr 42 mins
English (US) ·