BEFORE: This will wrap up the musical portion of the Movie Year, but it also kicks off a 5-film chain featuring everyone's favorite Jedi, the young Obi-Wan, Ewan McGregor. Linking from "Quadrophenia", Timothy Spall was also in a 2010 film titled "Jackboots on Whitehall" with Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Cassandra's Dream") - I'm afraid that's the best I can manage.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "I'm Not There" (Movie #375)
AFTER: If I were to refer to this film as "Citizen Bowie", I don't think I'd be that far off. With a reporter investigating the life of a vanished 1970's glam-rocker, one that everyone seems to know but no one seems to know well, of course the connections to Orson Welles thinly-veiled portrait of William Randolph Hearst are quite obviously being evoked here. And as far as I can tell, the only difference between the fictional Brian Slade and the actual David Bowie is that Bowie never went away, he merely morphed into another persona every decade or so.
Right away, I started wondering, if Slade is Bowie, then who is Curt Wild supposed to represent? My first thought was Mick Jagger, since Bowie's first wife allegedly caught them in bed together, but the pieces don't add up. A little research on Wikipedia tells me that Bowie produced the first solo albums for both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, so my best guess would be that Wild is a sort of amalgam of the two - Lou Reed for his orientation at the time, and Iggy Pop for his on-stage nudity and overall "Wild"ness. Most reviews of the film that I could find seem to agree with this theory.
This is a tack that Hollywood has been taking lately, if they can't get the rights to a performer's story, or they can't clear the rights to particular Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix songs, the filmmakers just forge ahead anyway, changing whatever names or songs they need to for the legal department to be satisfied. Unfortunately in the end, they just don't tell anything close to reality. I suppose here with ALL of the names changed, the attempt is to make a portrait of a Bowie-like singer who oozes Bowie-ness, without being Ziggy Stardust himself.
We live in a strange time, one where straight actors + musicians pretend to be gay (if they think it will get them an Oscar) and gay ones pretend to be straight (if they think it will keep them employed) so we should probably learn to celebrate the people who make their private lives public, even if they're not living the lifestyle we ourselves are accustomed to. And it's interesting to note that there was a time in the past where being bisexual wasn't just more acceptable, it was also a brilliant career move. A rocker could have a foot in both worlds, and appeal to both the young and old audiences, at least in theory.
I've talked to younger music fans who know who Bowie is, but were unaware that when he first hit the scene, he wore dresses and a ton of makeup. Naturally everyone made some "obvious" assumptions about his orientation, and then when he did that famous "Little Drummer Boy" duet with Bing Crosby and mentioned his son, a lot of fans had to check their hearing - wait, he's married with a kid? What's going on here? I think I first noticed Bowie in 1983 when "Let's Dance" was released, and I didn't realize that the most radical thing about the music video was that he was wearing men's clothing.
But here's the thing - people change over time, something people in both the straight and gay communities often have trouble understanding. You're either one thing or another, right? You're in or you're "out" - well, not exactly. Rules are meant to be broken, especially for famous people, and what is a homosexual relationship but another construct, another set of rules to break? Most sexperts now favor a 7-point scale, where "1" is completely straight and "7" is totally gay, "4" is bisexual - meaning there are degrees in-between on either side. Bowie identified as gay in 1972, then as bisexual in a 1976 interview, and by 1983 was calling himself a "closet heterosexual", a term that probably few people could get away with. Maybe some people should just check the box that says "whatever" and we should just let them do exactly that.
Lou Reed's another great example, someone who identified as gay in the early days of the Velvet Underground, knew Warhol and all of that NYC art scene, then he went solo with help from Bowie, who evidently acted as his producer/mentor/boyfriend (?) and then later had relationships with a transgender woman, an actual woman, and then Laurie Anderson. Meanwhile Bowie ended up married to Iman, one of the world's most beautiful women. Again, people's preferences can change over time, and I don't put myself in a position to judge.
Anyway, the film is about that place and time where famous Brit rockers were re-writing all the old rules, living as out and as proudly as they wanted, while being wildly creative at the intersection of music, film and art. I didn't really get the Oscar Wilde references, or the bits with the UFO's, but there's no question that the glam rockers of the 1970's changed the world, or at least forced people to question what they knew about sexuality.
The movie, however, falls just short of answering its own proposed questions, I feel this is probably a problem that stems from how it was made - turns out the filmmakers did option two unauthorized biographies, then just changed all the names to prevent a lawsuit. Since they couldn't come up with an ending for Slade's story that was too close to Bowie's, they instead just never got around to providing one, which seems like a huge cop-out.
Also starring Christian Bale (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Jonathan Rhys Meyers (last seen in "Match Point"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Hitchcock"), Eddie Izzard (last heard in "Igor"), Michael Feast, Emily Woof, Micko Westmoreland.
RATING: 5 out of 10 blow-up dolls
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