Springsteen Goes to the Movies: A Sort of Review
Bruce Springsteen is now a movie star and movie producer, though the film he made with Thom Ziminy, Western Stars, is hard to characterize…
Bruce Springsteen is now a movie star and movie producer, though the film he made with Thom Ziminy, Western Stars, is hard to characterize. We saw it Saturday night at the Regal in North Brunswick, surrounded by fellow Springsteen fans and the reaction was joy. The crowd applauded throughout, and there was buzz in the theater when someone tweeted out that The Boss had just introduced the film at its Freehold showing.
There were technical difficulties that delayed our showing, which led to the inevitable “maybe they’re waiting for him to arrive here” whispers, which sadly did not happen.
The film itself is a visually stunning and aurally rich experience. Shot in California and at Springsteen’s 100-year-old barn in New Jersey, the film swallows the big screen, while the soundtrack swells with operatic grandeur. Part concert film and documentary, it also is a visual meditation, a long voice over that feels like an extension of his Broadway show, and paean to American myth.
Bruce is center screen in nearly every scene, a riveting presence, his face telling its own stories. Springsteen does not have traditional movie-star looks, and yet his screen presence rivals some of our most accomplished actors. In photos, he is a magnet (see the work of Frank Stefanko, who probably has shot Bruce more than anyone, or the album covers on which he is featured). As he’s gotten older — he turned 70 just a few weeks ago — the expressiveness has deepened in a way that allows one (me) to see him inhabiting the stories he tells.
In the milieu of the Springsteen song, American mythology is central. The car, the open road, new beginnings, work and responsibility, are all filtered through a lens hazed over by a bit of Vaseline (an old film trick designed to soften the image). This mythology grows from a recasting of American history in film in he 1950s. The old west as depicted on film was a man’s paradise and proving ground. And it plugged into the very real desire for movement that has always characterized the nation (see Moby Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) — while also offering an escapist alternative to the stultified reality of corporation man, the suburbs, and the new housing development.
Much of this mythology resides in the faces and physical stature of film stars like Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne. Henry Fonda was more than an actor; his face was a signal to the audience about virtue, power, manhood. It’s why, as a friend told me the other day, John Wayne refused an offer to be in Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ spoof of westerns. He could not afford to venture outside the image he had carefully crafted and that his fans needed.
The early Springsteen created his own myth and stayed within its parameters, his face and body becoming carriers of this star-symbolism, even as he made the literal transformation from skinny street rat to muscular American icon and the lyrical shift from desperate teen on Born to Run and its two predecessors, to working adult on Darkness on the Edge of Town. This mythology seemed to make sense to him — until the Born in the U.S.A. tour demonstrated its limitations. (I write about this elsewhere.) Beginning with Tunnel of Love, which is quite different than much of what precedes it both lyrically and musically, he has sought to upend the myth to a degree (even on The Rising, which is the album most like his early ones in terms of its bigness, with songs like “Nothing Man,” “You’re Missing” and “Worlds Apart”). Western Stars — both the film and the album — are part of this break. Most of the characters in the songs are familiar, as are their troubles, but they are presented through a different lens — through age, through a different kind of music, with a different argument about identity being implied than the one we see early on. As we age, we learn. As we connect with others, build families, find real, lasting, deep love, we learn and grow and find pain and sadness, and we come to understand these are part of the larger journey, as well.
It is both a continuation, returning to the same themes he’s been writing about since the beginning (identity, manhood, family), but is set in a very different musical milieu, borrowing heavily from the country pop of Jimmy Webb’s work with Glen Campbell and others in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The lyrics tell stories of aging men facing crossroads decisions, or who find themselves struggling to understand their place. They can be poetic, but lack the wordplay of his early work and only allude to the narrative details he offers on his two acoustic solo records, Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad. It is the music, the orchestration, the soundscape that makes the record work, makes it memorable, makes it burrow into a space in the brain and continue to grow.
The film deepens the aural beauty and underlying sadness. The live orchestra, with its huge cinematic and scope, moves even farther to the forefront, creating a different kind of Springsteen experience — but it is still a Springsteen experience.
All of this is in the film and album, but it also requires a bit of Springsteen knowledge, a history with his music to work. That is partly why, for many, especially those who dislike Springsteen and his music, the film will fall flat. It will seem a vanity project, and it is on some level. But all art is vanity to a degree. The questions we as an audience have to ask before we judge its worth are whether the film says something interesting, whether it is presented in a vital manner, and whether it makes a connection with the audience. For me, and for many in the audience Saturday, I think the answer was yes. At the same time, I’d argue that for many others the answer will be no, and that gnawed at me as I watched, left me thinking the film was only partially successful, but no work of art is completely successful. No work of art can speak to everyone.
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