WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 2015

The life and artistry of Nina Simone illuminated in poignant documentary

The best documentaries exist as something more allegorical than the rote, history-lesson cataloging of the biographical details of a public figure’s life. Also, in spite of the vast scope of the subject’s fame and influence, they tend to be more effective when honing in on a selective perspective or point of view. 

In the marvelous What Happened, Miss Simone?, documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus explores the personal and professional life of the legendary jazz/blues/ folk artist by submitting her film as the literal answer to the titular question, one originally asked by author/poet Maya Angelou in a 1970 article penned for Redbook magazine.

Angelou’s interview with Simone coincided with the famed singer/composer/musician's turbulent transformation from jazz concert poet to The High Priestess of Soul in the late 60s. A time when the Civil Rights Movement so significantly influenced her work that she alienated her pop music fan base while simultaneously giving voice and inspiration to the nation’s unsung with her Top 100 single, “Young, Gifted, & Black” ( a song co-written with Weldon Irvine to, as Simone put it, “Make black children all around the world feel good about themselves forever.”).

The question Angelou posed: “Miss Simone, you are idolized, even loved, by millions now. What happened, Miss Simone?” - is tellingly ambiguous and suggest perhaps a contradiction. Is it the typical press agent query, “How did you get to where you are?”, or the more complex and infinitely more painful, “What happened to you in your life to make your music so raw and impassioned?” 

The High Priestess of Soul
(1933 - 2003) 

Garbus’ documentary, co-produced by and currently streaming on Netflix, examines the life of Nina Simone by turning the story of her tumultuous career and private life into a larger examination of what can happen when an artist—an individual devoted to the freest expression of truth—is born into a society which tells them everything they are, everything that comprises their very essence and being, is unworthy of dreams. Unworthy because of the color of their skin. The broadness of their nose. The thickness of their lips. That they are born female. As the film progresses and grows darker than you might expect, the social focus of the opening question morphs into the personal, "How did it come to this?"

As an African-American piano prodigy born in the Jim Crow-era South (“I played the boogie at (age) three and gave concerts at twelve”), Nina Simone, nee Eunice Waymon, was an anomaly in her small North Carolina hometown. Crossing train tracks to the “white” section of town to take piano lessons, practicing so much she barely had a childhood; Simone’s keenly-felt separateness defined her attitude towards both her musical gift and her ambitions.

Simone dreamed big: she wanted more than anything to be the first black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall. But when she was turned down by the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and had to take up performing jazz and pop music in clubs, the teenage Simone felt for the first time that most common, but nonetheless soul-killing, of African-American experiences- being certain but never truly knowing if race played a part in her rejection.

Nina Simone graduated valedictorian of her high school class and was awarded
a one-year scholarship at Julliard School of Music in New York

With this, the seeds of rage, self-doubt, and indignation began to take root within her just as firmly as her talents as a singer and musician blossomed. Fueled by an ambition to succeed, blessed with a talent that couldn’t be ignored, yet led by circumstance down a path not wholly of her choosing, Nina Simone’s demons were manifest in the same questions that plagued many frustrated African-Americans in pursuit of the American dream in those nascent civil rights years. The lingering oppression of separatism and Jim Crow led Langston Hughes to pen the 1951 poem, “Harlem.” A poem whose words articulated the conundrum facing all black artists and dreamers in America.

What Happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Throughout her life, Nina Simone’s mainstream success stood in the shadow of her unrealized dream to be a classical musician. Similarly, the material rewards of her success only reinforced her childhood sense of isolation…a gap she always sought to bridge with her music. Following the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls that same year;  the discrepancy she felt between her quality of life and that of the average black person living in America, altered and politicized her artistic expression.

We witness Nina Simone's transformation from demure, evening-gowned chanteuse playing to an all-white audience on TV's Playboy After Dark, to vibrant political activist joyously singing songs of protest and revolution (No pacifist, she. Simone believed in violent retaliation). The documentary juxtaposes these wildly contrasting professional images with equally at-odds-with-themselves accounts of her stormy private life.

Revolution Evolution

Through interview footage, rare recordings, snippets from her journals, and a mercifully sparse sprinkling of talking head commentary from her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly (the film’s executive-producer), husband /manager Andrew Stroud, and lifelong friends; we learn not only was Simone’s art and life matched in complexity and anguish but that each in many ways grew out of the other.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What Happened, Miss Simone? is gratifying on many levels. As someone who knew of  Nina Simone, but next to nothing about her, this look at her life is quite revelatory. Hats off to director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) for mounting such a clear-eyed portrait of a legendary icon. I also like that it’s a fairly straightforward documentary. Eschewing the contemporary trend toward visual gimmickry and the overuse of showy graphics, What Happened, Miss Simone? deals with its subject in a direct, head-on manner complementary to the great woman herself. Neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, What Happened, Miss Simone? is merely honest. Honest in a way that ultimately proves very real and very moving.

What Happened, Miss Simone? has some exceptional interview footage

*Scary side-note (make that terrifying): Sobering and sad how so much of the film's difficult-to-watch violent footage from the 60s Civil Rights Movement looks like just America in 2015.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Although running a brisk 100 minutes, a major asset of What Happened, Miss Simone? is the amount of time it allocated to footage of Simone performing. Her voice has mesmerized me for years, but it's truly a remarkable experience watching her in action. She's electric and unpredictable. I especially got a charge out of a bit of concert footage showing Simone stopping mid-song to point to and shout authoritatively at someone in the audience, "Hey, girl, sit down!" followed by a loooong unbroken stare and a second demand, "Sit DOWN!" Following a satisfied nod of the head signifying either the patron's compliance or execution, Simone calmly resumes the song at the exact point she left off.
Magnificent! 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My mother loved Nina Simone and played her records constantly when I was growing up. But as a child, I actually thought Nina Simone’s music was kind of scary. Not scary as in frightening, but somehow deeply sad and troubling in a way I was too young to understand. Of course, in retrospect, I know it was because the songs were too real. They weren't pop, they weren't escapist...they were authentic. Authentic in a way where I must have sensed (in that way kids can) that perhaps in her songs, she was saying things my mom felt, but could never say aloud.

Many years later, when the soundtrack to the 1993 movie, Point of No Return, introduced a whole new generation to Nina Simone (mostly hipsters and yuppies who, like those Playboy penthouse guests of yore, adored black music but black people, not so much), I seemed to listen to her with fresh ears. In place of what I once heard in her voice that scared me I heard the kind of naked self-exposure of a true artist. She wasn't just trying to make pretty sounds or packaging melodies for cocktail party consumption.

She was sharing the dejection of a sensitive, impressionable child told by the country of her birth that she was somehow less valuable, less beautiful, because of her skin. She sang about being a black woman of financial privilege who had to put on a smile and entertain while all around her African-American figures of hope were being killed off, one by one.
She opened up about her frustration in knowing that the more she sang about her personal truth as a black woman, the smaller her audiences would grow. In the midst of this was a woman battling a mental illness, a woman in an abusive relationship who visited that same violence onto her daughter. The dark, the light.
Nina Simone's genius lies in her ability to make poetry out of the contradictory and confounding ugliness and beauty that was her life. That triumph of What Happened, Miss Simone? is that it presents these sometimes unpleasant realities without ever diminishing the artistic legacy of this legendary woman with the soul-searing voice who was rightfully dubbed, The High Priestess of Soul.

PERSONAL FAVORITE NINA SIMONE RECORDINGS
Little Girl Blue (1958)
New World Coming (1971)
Just Like A Woman (1971)

Do What You Gotta Do (1968)
Sunday in Savannah (1968)
Here Comes the Sun (1971)

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2015

BLUE JASMINE 2013

By now I'm convinced that Woody Allen could shoot a science fiction film on the surface of the moon and it would still come out looking as though it took place in New York.

As filmmakers go, Allen is a little like those American tourists who travel all around the world only to Westernize the experience: staying at American chain hotels, eating American food, interacting with other American tourists, and insisting on speaking only English. Ever since Allen went to the UK in 2005 to remake Crimes and Misdemeanors…I mean, to film Match Point; critics have been falling over themselves praising the revitalizing effect locations like France, Spain, and Italy have had on his work. I've seen almost every Woody Allen film since 1969s Take the Money & Run, and I have to say, these newer off-the-continent films of his feel more like General Foods International Coffees retreads of his usual stuff.
But just as one resigns oneself to copious amounts of rear-screen projection when one seeks a Hitchcock film, it comes with the territory (so to speak) that no matter where a Woody Allen film takes place; you're going to get Manhattan.

I've been entertained by, but haven't really liked, a Woody Allen film since 1996s Everyone Says I Love You). And in spite of my fond feelings for Annie Hall, Radio Days, Manhattan Murder Mystery, September, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo, the only Allen film I think of with much affection is Love and Death (1975), and that's chiefly because it's so silly and wall-to-wall funny.

But a lot of that changed for me with Blue Jasmine. In this film, Allen balances the humor with the drama in a way that feels remarkably unforced. And while set both in Allen's beloved New York and a strange, Allen-esque version of San Francisco where all the working-class people speak with Jersey accents; it nevertheless is one of the first Woody Allen films in I don't know how long that has taken me by surprise. In addition, I believe it's the only Allen film I've ever been moved by. His most urgent, vivid film in years, Blue Jasmine teems with an energy I haven't felt in any of the director's recent going-through-the-motions efforts, and thanks to the monumental performance of Cate Blanchett, becomes a kind of flawless portrait of human weakness.  

Cate Blanchett as  Jasmine "Jeanette" Francis

Sally Hawkins as Ginger

Bobby Cannavale as Chili

Alec Baldwin as Hal Francis

Peter Sarsgaard as Dwight Westlake

Andrew Dice Clay as Augie

In this tale of a chic New York socialite (Jasmine, née Jeanette) whose life falls apart after her husband’s fraudulent financial schemes lead to the abrupt dissolution of both her marriage and her tenuous grip on reality; Allen, as is his wont, disavows any intentional allusions to either the Bernie Madoff case or Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Don't you believe it.
Destitute, disgraced, and more than a little delusional (the penniless Park Avenuer still travels First Class, dresses in Chanel, and convoys a cluster of Louis Vuitton luggage); Jasmine is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. More specifically, the kindness of the estranged. Jasmine's reversal of fortune makes it necessary for her to relocate to San Francisco to live in a manner she’d really rather not grow accustomed to with her adoptive sister Ginger, a working-class divorcee with two kids and a taste for tinpot Stanley Kowalskis guys who speak in dese, dems, and dose (cue the Ed Hardy clothing and Jersey Shore douchebag haircut).

"Tip big, boys. Tip big because you get good service."
Jasmine, who has fallen on extremely hard times and in minutes will tell her sister she's "Worse than tapped out," thinks nothing of tipping a cab driver $100  

Years spent living a princess’ privileged existence on Long Island and Park Avenue have left Jasmine singularly ill-equipped for coping with the steady bombardment of class-based culture shocks and workplace wake-up calls she encounters in her attempts to start a new life. Attempts thwarted by her own deluded sense of entitlement; a tendency to zone out and talk to herself; and a crippling nervous anxiety she medicates with fistfuls of Xanax washed down with Stoli martinis with a twist of lemon.
As flashbacks reveal the contradictory reality behind the veils of illusion, self-invention and self-deception Jasmine relies upon to get through the day, we come to better understand not only the poisonous, disruptive effect she has on those around her, but ultimately how her self-sabotaging ways have caused her to be the instrument of her own destruction.

Blue Jasmine brings thorny cringe-comedy and a surprisingly unflinching emotional intensity (especially for a Woody Allen film) to an irresistible premise that set class tensions, familial rivalry, accountability, guilt, remorse, ethics, consequence, and identity as the backdrops for a character study of an intriguingly neurotic woman hanging to life by a tether.

"I want to get my degree and become, you know, something substantial!"
Penniless and possessing zero marketable skills, Jasmine is forced to take a "menial" position as a dentist's receptionist

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Blue Jasmine has many terrific things going for it from the outset, starting with the jittery and highly unreliable narrator that is Jasmine French (she’s so unreliable we don’t even know if French is her real maiden name or one she made up). Embodying as she does the very worst of the kind of upscale New Yorker Woody Allen vacillates between admiring and resenting (think Interiors), a great deal of pleasure is derived from seeing this insufferable, Paltrowesque snob brought low by her shallow self-centeredness. But the beauty of the script (and Blanchett’s performance) is that our attitude toward Jasmine grows into something resembling, if not sympathy, then perhaps empathy. Empathy in direct proportion how little of her fragile sense of self the film is willing to leave her with. She's a difficult, largely unlikeable character, but it's surprising how much I found myself just hoping she could stay out of her own way long enough to pull herself out of the mess she'd created.

The Times of Your Life

I love the narrative structure of Blue Jasmine. Half of the film's most compelling dramatic and comedic conflicts arise out of the forced social interaction of radically dissimilar characters with conflicting/opposing objectives. The second half is like a forensic psychology dissection of Jasmine's earlier life, exposing the glaring and telling discrepancies between reality and the kind of desperate, blinkered survivalism that lay behind Jasmine's penchant for turning a blind eye to everything...particularly herself.

Jasmine in Happier Times
A vision of the morally poisonous allure of wealth worthy of Fitzgerald, Dreiser, or Flaubert

PERFORMANCES

When Cate Blanchett was awarded the 2014 Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Blue Jasmine, she always made it a point to thank Woody Allen for his screenplay. I specify screenplay and not performance because, based on everything I've read, Allen is one of those hands-off directors who leave actors to shape their performances for themselves.

I’ve already expressed the opinion that Woody Allen doesn’t really do anything but Woody Allen, and on paper, Jasmine is just another in a long list of his fragile, flinty neurotic females. Had he written it in the '90s, more than likely she would be played by Judy Davis; the '80s, Mia Farrow; the '70s, Diane Keaton. Jasmine isn't anyone Allen hasn't introduced us to many times before; it's just that in the very capable hands of Cate Blanchett, she turns a Woody Allen "type" into a real person. Arguably the first real person ever to inhabit a Woody Allen movie.

Another Man, Another Chance
Jasmine's sister, Ginger, meets nice guy, Al (Louis C.K.) 

The Australian-born Blanchett (who in 2009 appeared in a Liv Ullmann directed production of A Streetcar Named Desire) is as affecting with the scenes requiring stylish élan as she is in the scenes revealing Jasmine’s rapid mental and emotional deterioration. Blanchett is genuinely heartbreaking in these moments, the sprawling messiness of her character’s inability to grab hold of anything real within herself, single-handedly redeeming some of Allen’s more familiar and clichéd bits. (Allen exhibits no feel at all for San Francisco – which very well may be the point – and seems most in his element when giving voice, through Jasmine, to a certain obliviousness as to how regular people go about the business of living without benefit of buckets of money).

Cate Blanchett - Armani spokesmodel and Vogue fashion plate (top) - has a look ideally suited to credibly portray an elegant member of New York's elite super-rich. Playing a character whose identity and sense of self-worth has always been wrapped up in how others perceive her, Blanchett is at her most poignant when showing us a woman struggling not to let others see how hard she's fighting to maintain what is essentially a steadily crumbling facade.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Outside of Blanchett’s amazing performance, one of the major reasons I've come to rate Blue Jasmine as my #1 favorite Woody Allen film is because it deals with so many of the themes and subthemes I tend to seek out in movies. I've always been drawn to human-scale stories that hold the potential for emotional violence (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnage, Reflections in a Golden Eye), so a combustible character drama with plenty of strained conversations and heated exchanges like Blue Jasmine is practically an action film to me.

Jasmine's ideal life turns out to be anything but

I also love movies that ask us to examine our culture of wealth-worship and the American success myth (The Day of the Locust, A Place in the Sun), and why it is so many of us are willing to trade our souls and compromise our ideals in their pursuit.

"But a cheat is a cheat."
Jasmine's ethical code goes MIA when she gets the opportunity to start anew with
European diplomat Dwight, a "substantial" man of wealth and position  

I've a weakness for films that dramatize our limitless capacity for fooling ourselves, and not since Shelley Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux in Robert Altman's 3 Women has there been a more absorbing depiction of delusional behavior run amok than Blanchett's Jasmine French.

Struggling to find the line between reinvention and self-deception

Although it's Blanchett's show all the way, the entire cast of Blue Jasmine turn in impressive performances. Particularly English actress Sally Hawkins, who was so terrific in Allen's underrated Cassandra's Dream (2007), and Bobby Cannavale, who I liked so much in Annie. (I recently saw the film, Lovelace and enjoyed seeing both Cannavale and Peter Sarsgaard - who share no scenes in Blue Jasmine - in the cast).


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
At 79, Woody Allen is a filmmaker clearly out of touch in a lot of not-so-great ways: as usual, the only substantial roles for blacks you’ll find in Blue Jasmine are on the film's jazz soundtrack (there's something very Jasmine-like about Allen's love of black culture and antipathy for its people); but as one of the few directors still working with real people (not action figures), in actual locations (OK, so everyplace feels like New York, at least it’s not green screen), with stories that are actually about something…Woody Allen is also old-fashioned in a lot of ways that got me interested in film in the first place.
Which is to say, by recalling the bravura, female-centric dramas and character studies like Klute, A Woman Under the Influence, Images, and Diary of a Mad Housewife; Blue Jasmine feels like a film made in the 1970s. And if you're at all aware of my fondness for that decade, cinematically speaking, you'll know that I couldn't give a film a bigger compliment.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015