An In-Depth Review of 'Everybody Digs Bill Evans': A Jazz Biopic with Elegance and Poise
An Emotional Journey Through the Life of a Jazz Legend
The jazz piano of Bill Evans was characterized by grace and poise, a lightness of touch yielding a plaintive depth of feeling, that belied a life beset with chaos and tragedy. It's easy to imagine a biopic focusing solely on the turbulent biographical incidents, but the true challenge lies in conveying the artist's personal torment in the precise key of his own art. And that's exactly what Grant Gee's 'Everybody Digs Bill Evans' accomplishes with considerable beauty and feeling.
A Selective Focus, A Powerful Impact
Adapting Welsh author Owen Martell's short 2013 novel 'Intermission', the film takes a tight, selective approach, focusing on Evans' immediate, shell-shocked response to the death of Scott LaFaro, the gifted young bassist of the Bill Evans Trio, in 1961. While it sporadically flashes forward to other moments of seismic loss in Evans' life, the film honors the scope of its source, conveying a lifetime of mental illness, substance abuse, familial tension, and musical genius via a few months of intense grief and creative paralysis. What could feel contrived emerges as elegant and honestly felt, a study not just of the tumult that often produces great art, but the silence too.
A Notable Narrative Debut
Premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the film marks a notable narrative debut for Gee, the veteran British filmmaker behind music docs like 'Joy Division' and Radiohead's 'Meeting People is Easy'. His affinity for the rhythms and aesthetics of mid-century American jazz is evident, though less expected. The air of conviction is no small feat for a modest Irish-British production with a predominantly European cast, where County Cork stands in for both New York City and coastal Florida.
A Risk Worth Taking
The casting of Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie as Jersey boy Evans is a bold risk, but it feels spiritually right. Lie's refined, recessive melancholy fits the Evans aura to a T. A vigorous opening sequence, cut with mounting tension by editor Adam Biskupski, swerves from the Bill Evans Trio's performance in June 1961 to the car accident that killed LaFaro mere days later. A haunted stillness sets in, as Evans is retrieved from his shabby Manhattan apartment by his straight-arrow older brother Harry (Barry Ward).
Family Life and Creative Paralysis
Forced into family life, Evans can't shake the petrified mourning or his ongoing heroin habit, which has also forced a break in his relationship with long-term girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane). Ward gives a softly wrenching performance as the protective but roilingly envious Harry, whose own musical dreams were lapped by his brother's talent. The film then shifts to Evans' rehabilitation process in Florida, fraught with unspoken shame and reproval, but characterized by everyday patience and small domestic routines.
A Study of Silence and Emotion
'Everybody Digs Bill Evans' thrives on tacit ironies and stoically endured wounds. It only gives way to more agonized rushes of feeling when the timeline occasionally hurtles forward to later milestones of pain in the 1970s. Gee's sophisticated, stealthily moving film folds any bursts of emotion into its exquisitely dark shadows, letting Evans' limpid but heartsore music do most of the weeping. The film's title, 'Everybody Digs Bill Evans', is a pointedly cheerful nod to another of his albums, and it's this irony that makes the film so compelling.
