The director says I look like a battered monument. I have a terrible feeling he’s trying to be kind to me.
One More Time with Feeling
(2016)
Perhaps the aspect most underlining the legitimacy of this
nominal making-of-an-album (Skeleton Key)
documentary is that the tragedy informing it is never even outlined (I admit,
while I knew the basics, I wasn’t aware of the tabloid free-for-all that
ensued). Nick Cave lost a son, and as close as we come to addressing the
circumstances outright is his comment “Every
time I articulate it, it does him a disservice”.
Director Andrew Dominik originally intended to make a
performance-based piece, and you can see this more functional approach in the
problems with the 3D camera that open the documentary. It surely wouldn’t have
developed that way if the more ruminative, reflective, contemplative aspects of
the interview process had been considered at the outset, as technical trials tend
to hamper such openness. The musical renditions are gorgeous, mesmerising
affairs, however, and Dominik shoots them in a manner that captivates.
Particularly so the formulation of the album’s spoken word opener, Jesus Alone, with its atmospheric, minimalist
accompaniment as Cave’s persuaded he needs to do an overdub.
The doc includes significant contributions from Warren Ellis
(who looks like Joaquin Phoenix in his art instillation period) and Susie Bick,
but Cave is obviously front and centre (there’s a nagging feeling that Bick’s
inclusion is, with noble intentions, designed to show her as an independent
person with her own goals, but it has rather the opposite effect). He is
candidly elliptic in his conversation, addressing the sheer impossibility of
putting into words his feelings over his loss, yet with his every contribution
he reminds you he is indeed a philosopher poet (he comments of the album that
he usually doesn’t “let lines go I’m not
really pleased with” but this time his approach has been different – you wouldn’t
know it, even in his off-the-cuff conversation).
Cave discusses the suggestion that his songs have a prophetic
nature, something his wife is superstitious about, unconvinced by the idea, but
Dominik succeeds in pulling us into Cave’s subdued maelstrom, with his
admission of the loss of Arthur that “It’s
affected me in a way I don’t understand”. And how he still recognises the
person he sees in mirror, but within is another person. And how incidents are
revealing, of crying in a friend’s arms only for Cave to realise they’re
someone else he didn’t actually know very well. And the obverse, in response to
a room filled with kind eyes (“But when
did you become an object of pity?”)
He’s also more than willing to slay a few sacred cows, such
as the notion that trauma fuels creativity, since he found it only impeded the
imagination because it left no room for anything else. Some of his observations
are more general, such as on the aging process (“You decay and you sort of diminish… The struggle to do what I do
requires more effort”) or musing on anything that may disrupt the status
quo (“Most of us don’t want to change,
really. I mean, why should we?”) and his belief that there are no such
things as accidents, applying this musically (rather than in relation to the
singular accident that overshadows everything). Rather, they’re a magical
synthesis.
Dominik takes on board the looseness of Cave’s announced
approach to how he now composes (“I don’t
believe in the narrative any more… I don’t believe that there’s a pleasing
resolve”), whereby the resulting fractured narrative and its distressing
logic is much more real to the way the musician feel about things. So in his
design of the picture, Dominik imparts a feeling of unfolding as it will,
organically, while sufficiently aware enough of his own feelings on the matter
(that life is a natural, enforced narrative, and by extension so is a movie,
since both have a beginning and ultimately an end) to come back to the notion
of elasticity Cage mulls over in the opening sequences (how a friend was
mentioning “how time feels elastic these
days, the idea that all things are happening all the time... All past, present
and future are happening right now”). In closing Cave suggests, perhaps
more theoretically than practically, that he and Susie have decided to be
happy. You hope only that they get there.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.