Movie: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Michael Schultz, 1978)
I've never had strong feelings in either direction 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 trying to capture the effect Dylan had on his admirers, than in being a straightforward biopic. In trying to convey how it feels to be artistically and romantically moved by his music, 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). Their many closeups expressing their love and admiration are always informed by the notion that 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. We all love promises of hope and change, as long as other people have to do the changing.
In Schultz' Sgt, Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the villains are some unspecified developers driving around in a van equipped with a futuristic screen that allows them to spy on the people outside. The screen is surrounded by techy buttons, often operated by clumsy robots making whirring sounds. Once these strange modern creatures pass the streets of Heartland, USA, the town's farmers' market is transformed into an arcade hall where modern youths hang around rebelliously, mom-and-pop stores get into the hands of big busienss, families are torn apart, and the town gets swamped by uncollected waste. Restoring the traditional values is only possible if the country bumpkins who made it big as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in Los Angeles return for a benefit concert to their hometown to "restore decency". 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 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 about how in 1974 anthropologists 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 Beatles 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 retirment 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 with its origins in 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 was 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 its potentially mean-spirited subtext. I had read 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. I imagine it 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, who sings 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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