Movie: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Michael Schultz, 1978)
I've never had strong opinions about Bob Dylan, but do find DIamonds & Rust to be one of the great love songs. By extension, I absolutely loved A Complete Unknown, which is more interested in capturing how it feels to be artistically and romantically moved, than in being a straightforward biopic. In the process, director James Mangold gets two of the best performances in recent times out of Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton (playing respectively Joan Baez and Pete Seeger). They are beaming with love and admiration in their many closeups, always informed by the notion that it is incredibly good to feel that way about art and about other people. As a result, the film evokes both a really passionate romanticism and a fuzzy comforting warmth. One of the highlights is Dylan's 1965 performance of The Times They Are A-Changin' at the Newport Folk Festival, a wonderfully compelling depiction of the connection between an artist and his fans, with Mangold ramping up the sound of both the performance and the delirious excitement of the audience everytime Dylan calls out a different group for failing to understand and keep up with the changing mores of the youth. The next year Dylan returns to the Newport Folk Festival, decides to "go electric" and is aggressively booed and jeered off the stage by an audience that would prefer that everything stays the same. No scene will ever explain better the existence of Michael Schultz' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
This movie's villains are unspecified developers driving around in a van equipped with a futuristic screen that allows them to spy on the world outside. The screen is surrounded by techy buttons, often operated by clumsy robots making whirring sounds. Once these strange creatures pass the streets of Heartland, USA, its farmers' market is transformed into an arcade hall where modern youths hang around rebelliously, mom-and-pop stores get into the hands of big business, families are torn apart, and the town gets swamped by uncollected waste. "Restoring decency" is only possible if the homegrown country bumpkins making up Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band return from big time Hollywood for a benefit concert. It's a remarkably odd storyline for a Beatles jukebox musical, especially one centred around songs from their Sgt. Pepper album. The Beatles were instrumental in turning the kind of youth, urban culture this movie rails against into the mainstream, and Sgt. Pepper was a musical revolution that many of its fans saw as a signal of a broader societal revolution. It became an icon of the counterculture, psychedelia and the idea of looking forward. I've always liked the story of the 1974 anthropologists who found a skeleton that was key to a better understanding of how and when humans evolved from apes and named it Lucy after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, intertwining scientific and cultural progress.
Sgt. Pepper imagines the possibility of enjoying the Beatles' music in a pre-Beatles world where the cultural changes the group brought don't exist. Sgt. Peppers' band (consisting of the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) plays its songs in a farmhouse surrounded by pigs, goats and chickens or in the town's main square just outside the city hall, surrounded by churches, historic houses and a retirement home. Their audience consists of well-dressed, mostly white, people of all ages dancing with the joyous, yet respectful, understanding that they are following a communal tradition going back to the First World War, when the original Sgt. Pepper had a brass band that entertained the soldiers in Europe. All along, the old, kindly mayor (played by George Burns) commands respect as he narrates the scene and observes his citizens with great contentment. All is right and orderly in this town where "I get high with a little help from my friends" simply means that if you trust your fellow townfolk you can even fly a hot air balloon.
It's quite understandable that the Beatles weren't too fond of this movie, but it does make you appreciate their music even more. Their songs work even in a context that is antithetical to their intentions and values. In some cases, they work even better. Get Back is notably sung by a black magician restoring the town to its former glory, completely taking away the song's potentially mean-spirited subtext. I've known about the other Beatles being dumbfounded and annoyed by Paul McCartney's insistence to record Maxwell's Silver Hammer, but had never actually heard the song. It really only works when sung by Steve Martin playing a deranged plastic surgeon cutting assembly line patients in his surrealistic office. It's not a surprise that surrealism is the main aesthetic of all antagonists, including Aerosmth who sing a brilliant cover of Come Together on a stage of giant coins stacked upon each other, signifying the greed of the modern world. The best performance comes from Earth Wind & Fire's Dianne Steinberg, performing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as a billboard come alive against the Los Angeles night sky. I also rather liked Sandy Farina (and was surprised to find that this was her only movie) who, playing Peter Frampton's true love is tasked with selling the film's wistful nostalgia. She succeeeds, partly because her performances of Strawberry Fields Forever and Here Comes the Sun are quite affecting, partly because she is the only one of the main actors who knows how to handle a dialogue-free performance (with the exception of the Mayor, nobody has any lines that aren't sung), evoking sweetly mousy heroines from the silent film era. In the end, the Bee Gees get the short end of the stick. The film turns them into a square Beatles cover band that gets the least interesting scenes.
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