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20,000 Days on Earth
October 7th, 2014 10:1120,000 Days on Earth (2014), directed by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard
This is a documentary about Nick Cave (and some of the Bad Seeds) which I liked a whole lot, and I recommend it even if you have no interest in his music.
I like Cave but I'm not exactly a fan— I probably would've gone crazy for him in high school, except that my sister got there first and played his records so much that I got sick of them, so then I ignored him for a long time and, even when enjoying some of his stuff later, always kind of felt like he reminded me too much of my own extravagantly depressive youth. So I appreciated that the movie is partly about the tension between "mature artist with lots of interesting history" and "absurdly Byronic overgrown adolescent," and not only shows Cave being both, but takes both fairly seriously, making a good case that it's totally appropriate to take the power of a teenage mood swing (aged for decades in a cask of heroin) and translate it into a carefully crafted piece of music made by a bunch of middle-aged guys calmly sitting on chairs 20 feet apart in a studio.
The band appears at intervals throughout the movie, building up gradually from unglamorous studio tasks to full-length simple performances until you finally get a big explosion of rock-star stuff at the very end, intercut with 30 years of video footage, where the effect is simultaneously "yes they are rocking out" and "good grief, how many times can one guy get filmed being cool and angry?"; it's a relief when it finally falls away and you're back in an open quiet space, with Cave being small again. The moment when you first see some of his young fans in the front row at a show, and they're treating him like the Messiah, got a big laugh from the audience but it wasn't really derisive, more like: ah yeah, it is kind of ridiculous to be a young person who worships a singer and thinks he's speaking directly to you, but he's putting a shitload of work into giving them this experience, and he means it, and this is just what one does in that situation— plus, we've just seen him telling Kylie Minogue that he plays intensely to the front row because he doesn't feel like he knows how to play to the whole room.
There's plenty of non-music stuff in the movie but most of it is performance of some kind. Some scenes are filmed impressionistically with the intent of presenting the world the way Cave says he experiences it, which could be a terrible idea if it weren't so well filmed (there is some gorgeous photography and editing in this). Similarly, having Cave discuss his childhood with a therapist could be a terrible idea, except that they're both clearly having a great time doing this and if you're going to have the subject of your documentary reminisce about himself a lot, why not go all the way and have it literally be therapy? Even inanimate objects get into the act: in a series of (almost certainly restaged) conversations while driving, there's constant and carefully timed accompaniment by a tireless solo windshield wiper.
Early on Cave says that he stopped being a human being at some point; he never bothers to clarify that, but it sounds like he meant it as a step down to something not really satisfactory or complete, but still worth being. Completeness as an unavailable ideal is another thing the film is about. We meet some archivists whose whole job is to pick through scraps of his memorabilia (something he dreamed of as a young waster, having written a will that left all of his nonexistent money to establish a Nick Cave Memorial Museum) and try to make sense of every random background image. We hear about his family and his awe for his wife, but the family stays blatantly invisible (except in one pretty funny scene that defines a peaceful father-son moment as pizza and Scarface). The desire to surrender to the world and take it in is all mixed up with the desire to impose your own massive persona on the world, which leads to the best joke in the movie: "You know I can control the weather with my moods. I just can't control my moods."
This is a documentary about Nick Cave (and some of the Bad Seeds) which I liked a whole lot, and I recommend it even if you have no interest in his music.
I like Cave but I'm not exactly a fan— I probably would've gone crazy for him in high school, except that my sister got there first and played his records so much that I got sick of them, so then I ignored him for a long time and, even when enjoying some of his stuff later, always kind of felt like he reminded me too much of my own extravagantly depressive youth. So I appreciated that the movie is partly about the tension between "mature artist with lots of interesting history" and "absurdly Byronic overgrown adolescent," and not only shows Cave being both, but takes both fairly seriously, making a good case that it's totally appropriate to take the power of a teenage mood swing (aged for decades in a cask of heroin) and translate it into a carefully crafted piece of music made by a bunch of middle-aged guys calmly sitting on chairs 20 feet apart in a studio.
The band appears at intervals throughout the movie, building up gradually from unglamorous studio tasks to full-length simple performances until you finally get a big explosion of rock-star stuff at the very end, intercut with 30 years of video footage, where the effect is simultaneously "yes they are rocking out" and "good grief, how many times can one guy get filmed being cool and angry?"; it's a relief when it finally falls away and you're back in an open quiet space, with Cave being small again. The moment when you first see some of his young fans in the front row at a show, and they're treating him like the Messiah, got a big laugh from the audience but it wasn't really derisive, more like: ah yeah, it is kind of ridiculous to be a young person who worships a singer and thinks he's speaking directly to you, but he's putting a shitload of work into giving them this experience, and he means it, and this is just what one does in that situation— plus, we've just seen him telling Kylie Minogue that he plays intensely to the front row because he doesn't feel like he knows how to play to the whole room.
There's plenty of non-music stuff in the movie but most of it is performance of some kind. Some scenes are filmed impressionistically with the intent of presenting the world the way Cave says he experiences it, which could be a terrible idea if it weren't so well filmed (there is some gorgeous photography and editing in this). Similarly, having Cave discuss his childhood with a therapist could be a terrible idea, except that they're both clearly having a great time doing this and if you're going to have the subject of your documentary reminisce about himself a lot, why not go all the way and have it literally be therapy? Even inanimate objects get into the act: in a series of (almost certainly restaged) conversations while driving, there's constant and carefully timed accompaniment by a tireless solo windshield wiper.
Early on Cave says that he stopped being a human being at some point; he never bothers to clarify that, but it sounds like he meant it as a step down to something not really satisfactory or complete, but still worth being. Completeness as an unavailable ideal is another thing the film is about. We meet some archivists whose whole job is to pick through scraps of his memorabilia (something he dreamed of as a young waster, having written a will that left all of his nonexistent money to establish a Nick Cave Memorial Museum) and try to make sense of every random background image. We hear about his family and his awe for his wife, but the family stays blatantly invisible (except in one pretty funny scene that defines a peaceful father-son moment as pizza and Scarface). The desire to surrender to the world and take it in is all mixed up with the desire to impose your own massive persona on the world, which leads to the best joke in the movie: "You know I can control the weather with my moods. I just can't control my moods."
