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Dollar bill blues Or: a pair of docs about men bigger than America By Johnny Ray Hustonjohnny@sfbg.com
Cards from a deck floating up toward the sky – in the world of documentary, this image is poetic, but for a movie about the songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who died at the age of 52, it's apt. Some of Van Zandt's best friends thought he'd be gone a long time earlier: "I booked this gig 37 years ago," fellow musician Guy Clark joked at the funeral. A pledge pin that pierces the skin, Margaret Brown's Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt is more in tune with the dark heart of Van Zandt's songs than VH1's Behind the Music would ever be (not that it would cover him anyway). It also has the journalistic skill to allow an interview subject such as Clark – especially when jousting with his wife, Susannah – the type of complicated candor that's richer than any acting. Because it's a true Southern tale of a family's bonds of love, substance abuse, and manic-depressive madness, Be Here to Love Me could be taken as a less-drama-queen cousin of Tarnation. If Brown isn't as free-associatively kinetic as Jonathan Caouette, she's still in tune visually with soul-rending songs like "Rake," not to mention imaginative enough to broadcast Van Zandt from a TV in the type of motel room where he loved to write or the type of shadowy bar where he loved to drink. Both directors begin their movies with blurry shots of landscapes seen while in motion – in fact, Brown allows Van Zandt and his extraordinary music to thoroughly haunt the viewer and travel the interstate before his face is even seen. Like Caouette's mother in Tarnation, Van Zandt was never the same after he literally had a great fall (from four stories high). But Caouette didn't have a song like Van Zandt's "Nothin'<\!q>" by his side in exploring the void left by shock treatment. Brown does. Townes Van Zandt was a cowboy of distinction who could make some important distinctions himself, whether they be between aloneness and loneliness or, more disturbingly, between different kinds of deaths. The FBI certainly considers John Trudell an Indian of distinction – according to the new documentary Trudell, the bureau's dossier on him has reached 17,000 pages and counting. It makes you wanna wonder – more like holler – why a house containing Trudell's wife and children went up in flames in 1979, mere hours after he burned an American flag in front of FBI headquarters. Trudell makes some important distinctions himself; in fact, his take on the difference between authority and power is especially profound. Director Heather Rae's approach to the bio-doc doesn't have the meditative depth or visual flair of Brown's, but she's equally acute at using interviews to dig through myth to a man below. Trudell contains some revelatory lecture clips (as well as footage from Thunderheart and Incident at Oglala), yet what lingers is Trudell's dedication to those around him in the face of persecution and in the wake of trauma. "I'm a father, and that's a goal in itself," a grave-faced Van Zandt says at one point in Be Here to Love Me. When Trudell's daughter speaks about him in Trudell, her raw honesty makes it clear that he's reached that goal and gone beyond it. SFBG BE HERE TO LOVE ME Opens Fri/3 Opera Plaza Cinema 601 Van Ness, SF (415) 267-4893 Act I and II 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 464-5980 www.townesthemovie.com TRUDELL Opens Fri/3 Red Vic Movie House 1727 Haight, SF $4-$7 (415) 668-3994 www.trudellthemovie.com |
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