Low Down

I shouldn't have given this movie a star rating since I didn't actually finish it. It was just too depressing. There is literally not a moment of light in the first 45 minutes. Anyone who has lived around people ruining their lives with drugs and/or alcohol need to approach this film with caution. Maybe things lighten up in the second half, but I had better things to do with my time than wait around to find out. The poor kid.

I'm not a devoted fan of the style of jazz in this movie. This is surprising because I do like jazz, but I like it when it is more commercial and radio-friendly. Vince Guaraldi is about as intellectual as I get, and that's because of the numerous "Peanuts" specials. But the music here is pleasant to listen to. Except when Amy's friends play rock and roll.

While I had some trouble following what was going on, it appears Amy is 13 and the action at the movie's start is taking place in the early 1970s. We are shown relevant news stories just to drive home the point.

I wanted Joe to succeed in his efforts, and he seemed to be a really nice guy who cared about his daughter, but ultimately things weren't going to go his way.

Without knowing who she was, I immediately realized the actress playing Amy's grandmother was really talented. When I saw the credits, I understood. Glenn Close is one of the top actresses working today, and she consistently delivers here. She is definitely the standout performer. The character is loving but tough.

Another talented actor is Peter Dinklage. You look at how short he is and have certain expectations, but he has the talent and the voice of someone twice his size. It is a brief role as a man living in a rundown apartment because he cant afford better, but he takes it seriously. He makes the character likeable, so I wish there had been more to the role.

Elle Fanning does a good job as the daughter who wanted so much more from her father. It's a shame this is all based on reality because one wishes her life could have been better.

I liked Amy's boyfriend who had seizures. It's such a shame people weren't more understanding about his problems.

The movie is not a classic and it is by no means a family friendly feel-good film, but it is probably worth seeing.

Before directing "Low Down", American Jeff Preiss worked as director of photography on some documentaries, including the award-winning Let's Get Lost, about musician Chet Baker, as well as directing videos for Mariah Carey, R. E. M. And B-52's. Familiar with the musical universe, he opted for the biopic of jazz pianist Joe Albany. The story is told from the point of view of Amy-Jo (Elle Fanning), daughter of the musician and author of the book, who together with Topper Lilien also wrote the script. Joe, played with intensity by John Hawkes, is a talented, tormented musical genius who has sunk into drugs. Preiss does not victimize him. And it couldn't, since everything is filtered through Amy-Jo's loving gaze. "Low Down" does not follow the pattern of biopics that seek to cover the entire life of the character portrayed. The director is economical in the moments that are shown and emphasizes the waste of a career that could have gone much further.

Preiss spends most of the first half of the film introducing us to Joe's world - the bars and strip clubs where he gets a few gigs, the back rooms where he gets high, and his network of equally addicted friends and associates (including a fellow musician very well played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea). And if the film sometimes lacks dramatic drive, it is rich in Bukowski's atmosphere, helped immensely by the work of art director Elliott Hostetter and the Super 16mm cinematography of the talented Christopher Blauvelt ("The Bling Ring"), who has the blurry, amber light of old instamatic photographs.

What you see at the beginning of the film is pretty much what you get for the next two hours - the long, slow, steady decline of an addict, punctuated by the usual moments of intervention, false hope, and relapse. But within this well-known plot ("Bird", "'Round Midnight"), Preiss smartly avoids many of the usual clichés. Just as the Coen brothers did with "Llewyn Davis," he doesn't go out of his way to make Joe Albany an exceptional case: his talent is evident but never inflated to levels of genius, and we see that his dependence is also shared by many around him. . He is, in short, a flawed, human, wounded man, and Hawkes brings a humility to the role that says no one understands this better than Joe himself. Joe likes to get high, he admits at the end of the film, and when we see the peaceful calm that envelops him after getting high - the way his body goes slightly limp, as if he were a child back in the womb - we understand exactly what why.

About halfway through the film, Joe decides to skip parole and seek better fortune in Europe, leaving Amy in the care of her maternal grandmother (Close, made up to look a bit like Edith Bunker), who represents the only constant, stabilizing influence in the film. Girl's life. Two years later, when Joe returns, deported and sentenced to five years' probation (the judge was a jazz fan), the family settles into an uncomfortable trio. Amy is now a young woman, with a musician boyfriend of her own (the excellent newcomer Caleb Landry Jones) and Joe tries for a while to stay clean, to become the father he wants to be. You don't need to know the outcome of Albany's real-life narrative to see where this is going, and some of the best scenes in "Low Down" are those devoted to Amy's own dawning realization that she is lost to saving her father - even putting herself in danger to get the drugs she knows he wants.

Preiss has carefully created a very evocative look here, working in Super 16 with cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt (The Bling Ring), a grungy look favoring an extensive palette of brown and beige tones in which blown-out windows and lights leave faces and other objects in the foreground in darkness and shadows. Specifically, the camera style strongly echoes Conrad Hall's extraordinary work on John Huston's "Fat City," with a shot of daylight flooding an abandoned bar almost precisely duplicating one from the 1972 film. Topper Lilien and Albany is frustratingly amorphous, with little sense of dramatic shaping or rhythm. It often feels like you're just passing time with the characters as they face yet another purposeless day, and in Joe Albany's case, to see if he can get through it without wandering off for yet another fix. Played sympathetically by Hawkes, Joe is a nice guy with a kind heart, especially when it comes to his daughter. Unfortunately, he's not always there for her, and her support system is precarious at best; the mother (Lena Headey, powerful) is a hopeless and moody drunk, so in a pinch, Amy-Jo has to stay with Joe's mother, Gram (Glenn Close, frighteningly good), a tough woman who, one might think, could take care of the teenager more responsibly than she does.

Amy-Jo goes to school sometimes, loves listening to her father play, which he does beautifully, and can spot suspicious characters and drug dealers from miles away. Her hopes for life and goodwill toward her father seem infinite, which only makes his neglect of her well-being all the more heartbreaking. He breaks parole and is thrown back into prison for a while, must undergo a period of review, and complains that, "Here, no one seems to care about music," which raises the question of why they don't look for pastures. Greener somewhere else. In fact, at one point, Joe leaves his daughter behind and disappears to Europe for two years, only to be deported for drugs and have his passport revoked, yet another careless move in a life seemingly full of them. Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany; Sure, it's told from his daughter's perspective, but over the course of two hours we're never told what the song really means to him or even how he feels about what he's done with his life. Most of the time, it seems like he's avoiding any genuine responsibility, whether for his daughter, from whom he tries to shield the worst of her behavior, or for himself. The priorities are drugs, first, music, and then everything else. The fabric of his life is evocatively represented, but very little of the man, whose drug addiction dominates him most of the time. At one point, Amy-Jo finds her first boyfriend, Cole (Caleb Landry Jones), an epileptic drummer with his own problems.

"Low Down" doesn't skimp on equally touching moments. Close, who is as competent as Hawkes and Fanning here, has the anguished look of a mother who feels she has somehow failed, at one point even cradling her adult son in her arms and whispering, "My poor lost son." And Heady has a great bittersweet scene at the end - an attempted mother-daughter reunion interrupted by drunken self-hatred. However, the film as a whole has a strangely formless feel; it doesn't flow from one scene to the next, but rather jerks spasmodically, and lacks a clear point of view. (The film begins with Amy's voice-over narration and is strongest when it appears to unfold through her eyes, but it often veers into scenes that don't involve her.) It's also about 10 to 15 minutes longer than it should be. . Preiss may have tried to infuse "Low Down" with the feel of jazz - with unpredictable, ever-changing rhythms - but he is only partially successful. He made a good movie with a better one trapped somewhere inside. In addition to multiple tracks from the real Albany, the film's excellent jazz soundtrack, produced by Swiss-Israeli composer/arranger Ohad Talmor, features classic performances by Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach alongside new recordings with trumpeter Russ Johnson and pianist Jacob Sacks.

The weakness of "Low Down" is that it loses the ironic tone and funny parts of the eccentric, disheveled Albany of the memoir. In the film, Amy-Jo befriends - and develops a small crush on - a lonely dwarf (Peter Dinklage) who lives in her hole-in-the-wall apartment building. In the book, she is fascinated and sometimes delighted when he reveals himself as a porn star, but on screen, it is presented as a crushing blow to her innocence. Fanning is among cinema's most expressive young actresses, and she's a vivid presence here-her observation makes it clear that Amy-Jo will grow up to write her story. But the character is a bit prissy, and, in the end, when she herself approaches the heroine, there is absolutely no preparation for it.

The production emphasizes the idea that what you experienced as a child is "normal" for you, even if you grew up seeing things children shouldn't see and enduring things they shouldn't have to endure. One of the film's most quietly unsettling scenes shows Amy watching a man knock on a neighbor's door, then continuing to watch as the woman opens the door, lets the man in, and tells her young son to wait in the hallway. A subsequent shot of Amy and the boy watching TV in the building's lobby captures the instant rapport that children of addicts feel. Fanning's performance in this mostly reactive role could hardly be bettered; we understand every tremor of feeling in Amy as we watch her move, listen, and be heartbroken. Preiss's film does a consistently excellent job of explaining the allure of jazz and the psychology of addicts, their enablers, and their children without explaining anything. We just watch and understand.

If you've read the book, you'd have experienced many surreal scenes verging on hilarity, interspersed with the bitter realities of a junkie's orbit. The film reversed the dynamic; almost unbroken misery with dim flashes of humanity. The book is near-shaking with energy, the movie is a long, sad slog.

The choices in casting are great and it all should have added up to a major win, but its eyes are set only on the dismal and seedy aspects of Albany's story. There's not enough Jazz, not enough laughter or wonder or hope, all of which the novel has in spades. I couldn't help but reflect on what could have been.

"Low Down" (2014 release; 120 min.) brings the true story of famed jazz pianist Joe Albany's struggle with drugs, as see through the eyes of his 13 yr. old daughter Amy-Jo (or A.J.) Albany. As the movie opens, we are reminded that it is "Hollywood, 1974", as we say Amy-Jo (played by Elle Fanning) looking through magazines, waiting on her dad's return home. Amy-Jo loves watching him practice and play. Soon we learn that Joe (played by Jphn Hawkes) is in trouble for having broken his parole, and he is taken back in by cops. Amy-Jo moves in with her Gram (played by Glenn Close). To tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: first, please note that this is not a biopic of Joe Albany, but instead a look at a very specific phase in Amy-Jo's life when she was 13 through 15, which happens to coincide with Joe's never-ending battle with heroin. In fact, the book is based on Amy-Jo's memoir and she is credited as having co-written the script for the movie. Second, this is not particularly a feel-good movie, far from it, as these characters are living in less than glamorous conditions, and they are surrounded by low-lives. Third, the movie is set in the mid-70s and does a great job bringing that era to life with lots of audio and video clips that play on the TV. Less charming is the incessant smoking of cigarettes, I mean I don't think there is a single scene in the movie where someone isn't smoking. Fourth, as you can well imagine, this type of material tends to bring out great acting performances, and that is certainly the case here. Elle Fanning who was 15 when this movie was shot, is outstanding as the adoring daughter who realizes that her dad is in serious trouble. John Hawkes, best known for his roles in Winter's Bone and The Sessions, brings a heartfelt performance as the pained jazz pianist. At one point, when Gram talks to A.J about dreaming of a better future, Joe shrugs "Mine is a life of wasted dreams", wow. And what can you say about Glenn Close as the pianist's mother (A.J.'s grandmother), I was simply blown away. Check out also Flea (of Red Hot Chili Peppers) in a smaller role. I was quite surprised when the end titles rolled to see that both Flea and Anthony Kudis of the Peppers executive-produced the movie. Good for them! Last but not least, music, and jazz music in particular plays a huge role in the movie so if you don't care much for it, you may want to stay away. There are other song placements, including David Bowie's "Golden Years".

"Low Down" opened this weekend out of nowhere without any pre-release buzz or advertising at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati. I figured this would not play very long so I want to see it this weekend. The screening I saw this at Sunday late afternoon turned out to be a private affair, as in: I was literally the only person in the theater. That's a shame. Maybe this movie will find a larger audience when it is released on DVD. If you have a chance to check out "Low Down", realizing this is not a movie you'll walk out thinking "this was a jolly good time", I'd readily recommend that you do so, be it in the theater, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray.