Everybody Digs Bill Evans
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In a virtuosic riff on a biopic standard, this Silver Bear–winning ensemble piece plays on the emotions of the people surrounding an anguished US jazz piano icon.
June 1961: the Bill Evans Trio have just live-recorded a New York residency that will spawn two celebrated jazz albums. Ten days later, a car crash kills bassist Scott LaFaro at just 25. Devastated, Evans can’t even touch a piano. He stays with his brother Harry, sister-in-law Pat and adoring niece Debby; shoots heroin with his girlfriend Ellaine; and journeys silently, scarily inward. Bill’s depressive black hole starts to claim Harry – a music conservatory teacher who envies his kid brother’s genius – and even shadows their working-class parents’ sunny Florida retirement.
British documentarian Grant Gee (Joy Division) won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Director with this fiction debut, whose jaunty title – borrowed from an early Evans album – belies its deeper themes. In elegant black-and-white, the film seeks its lost subject in negative space, emulating his subtle style; impressionistic montages shimmer like harmonic chords and slide across chronologies like modal progressions. Playing both Evans and his compositions, frequent Joachim Trier collaborator Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World, MIFF 2021) is magnetically quiet, while Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf are in career-best form as Bill’s parents.
“The movie’s artful direction, nimble structure, visual richness and impeccable performances make for something full-bodied, compelling and deeply affecting, its melancholy beauty lingering long after the end credits roll.” – The Hollywood Reporter
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