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 othing
gets me more hype than finding out that a musician
I am a fan of is really as fucking weird as I
imagined them to be. For instance, Prince. Now, if
you're a rabid Prince enthusiast like myself, you
will have watched posted interviews and all of his
videos on launch.com at every party you have ever
been at where there is a DSL connection and people
under the influence to indulge you. Maybe part of
my fascination with Prince is that I like to make
fun of how ridiculous he is, but empirically
speaking, his videos are
pretty out there (I recommend the video for
"My Name is Prince"). After hearing
Kevin Smith's Prince story in "An Evening
with Kevin Smith" however, it was
demonstrated to me that the chain links he wears
over his face in the aforementioned video are not
to hide blemishes, but rather his utter
egomaniacal insanity.
Leonard Cohen, for me,
doesn't reside in Prince's echelon of eccentricity
or artistic prowess, though his music and poetry
is unique and captivating, especially when
filtered through the deep octaves of his
mystically untrained voice. The documentary
"Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man" works to
bring out some of the freak in this ex-hipster
turned Zen Master. With all the earnestness of an
earnest man, flamboyant singer/songwriter Rufus
Wainwright relates that his first encounter with
Leonard Cohen went something like this: he walked
into the Cohen house and found Mr. Cohen, aka the
ladies man, in nothing but a pair of underwear
and…he was regurgitating a piece of breakfast
sausage into the beak of a convalescent bird he
was helping to rehabilitate.
"Leonard Cohen I'm Your
Man" is a musical tribute to this artist, who
is part Gordon Lightfoot poetic folk, part Tom
Waits with a cathexis on love and sex, a little
Jack Kerouac, and a lot of idiosyncratic
connection with the unconscious musical force that
blesses only those chosen to receive its
transmission. The tribute section of the
documentary consists of footage taken from a
January 2005 concert in
Sydney
,
Australia
shot by director Lian Lunson. All of the Cohen
classics are performed by fellow Canadian
musicians and a slew of Indie big shots – oh,
and of course, the annoyingly ubiquitous U2. Bono
and his sophomoric faux philosophical commentary
is unfortunately allowed almost as much screen
time as Cohen himself. It is almost as if, and
maybe this is me just bitterly ranting, that a day
doesn't go by where I am free of Bono in all his
amoebic forms. My second hand intake of Bono is
greater than that of my parents. Sorry, Mom.
The performances are an
ill-balanced hodgepodge of masterful presentations
of the material -- "Everybody Knows" and
"Hallelujah" sung by Rufus Wainwright
(wearing a gaudy rhinestone necklace like my
grandmother or the Queen of England), "If It
Be Your Will" by some portly Robert Smith
looking dude named Anthony who had an incredible
voice and incredibly coked out mannerisms, and
"Tonight Will Be Fine" by Teddy
Thompson; plus, inorganic, SNL worthy renditions
by the McGarrigle sisters, Perla Batalla and Julie
Christensen. Performances by
Nick
Cave
, Jarvis Cocker and the others fall somewhere in
between.
Ostensibly, the value of the
film is in the biographical information about the
man behind the music, his turbulent life and
acquiescence to a Zen outlook. As a viewer, I felt
that, since this section was given much less
attention than the less than average concert, I
was cheated out of information on how Cohen went
from being a poet outside the mainstream to a
famous musician, what his life was like during his
years on the road and many other vital facts
pertaining to what seems to be a life nourished by
an expansive wealth of captivating experiences.
When he is given a chance to speak, Cohen's narratives are humorously
self-effacing, negating, poignant and far more
compelling than anything else in the film.
Fans of Cohen will enjoy
"Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man", maybe not
so much the performances but as a whole. Cohen
newbies and posers, like myself, will find it to
be an adequate introduction to this brilliant
artistic demigod who admonishes himself and all of
us to, "Abandon your masterpiece. Sink into
the real
masterpiece".
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