Chet Baker, 1953
Chet Baker with Miles Davis and Rolf Erickson, 1952
BORN TO BE BLUE B-
USA Great
Britain Canada (97 mi)
2015 d: Robert Budreau
So please forgive this
helpless haze I’m in
There is a dearth of good films about legendary jazz
musicians, where only Bertrand Tavernier’s ROUND MIDNIGHT (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s
BIRD (1988) come to mind, as they all seem to get lost in overreaching
melodramatic stories that overlook the obvious impact of race and drugs while
refraining from telling the stories with any degree of authenticity or social
realism. This film is no different,
unfortunately, as it never really places the life of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker
in its appropriate setting, shying away from the origins of the West Coast jazz
scene in the late 40’s and 50’s, featuring the likes of white musicians Stan
Getz, Jerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, and Art Pepper, which
still remains a separate entity from the mecca that is New York, the home of
more prominently known black musicians Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis.
This film doesn’t really get into that, though it’s at the heart of the
untold story. Instead, written and directed
by Budreau, it reimagines Baker’s troubled life using a less interesting, more
conventional romantic narrative surrounding the complexities of the man with a
horn’s love interest, combining at least three wives and several girlfriends
into a single character, turning this into a relatively safe interracial love
story that surprisingly never even explores the racial aspects. While confining the story to just a few years
from the mid 60’s when Chet Baker disappeared from the music scene, it traces the
origins to a lengthy incarceration in Italy for drug offenses that led to a
severe beating over a drug debt that left his front teeth broken, requiring reconstructive
surgery and dentures, where the time off was needed to relearn how to play with
dentures. During this down time, the
film consolidates his life through frequent flashback sequences either in
tinted, washed-out color or black and white imagery. In the process the film fictionalizes his
life, always a worrisome technique, as it willingly adheres to the Hollywood
mold.
What’s completely missing is the early 50’s success, where
Baker’s good looks made him the “James Dean” of jazz, developing screaming female
groupies while earning such adulation that he was voted the #1 jazz trumpeter
by readers over the more widely acclaimed Miles Davis in consecutive polls by Downbeat magazine in 1953 and 1954, DownBeat Readers
Poll Archive. Instead, the film
picks up in the middle of his career where he’s already famous, as he’s pulled
out of an Italian prison to include him in a movie, a film within a film where
art imitates life, as it’s on the set in a movie about his life (that was
eventually abandoned by Dino de Laurentiis) that Chet Baker (Ethan Hawke) meets
the actress playing his wife Jane Azuka, Carmen Ejogo, who played Coretta Scott
King in Selma
(2014). After displaying initial
resistance, they go on a bowling date where she finally succumbs to his charms,
as she literally melts in his arms when he sings her “I’ve Never Been in Love
Before” Chet Baker - I've
Never Been In Love Before - YouTube (4:28), which bookends their
relationship and may as well be their theme song, as the utter sincerity of
their commitment remains intricately connected to the song. While she’s very much her own person, well-educated,
a trained jazz pianist and vocalist to go along with her method acting skills,
both have highly individualistic bohemian tendencies leftover from the Beat
Generation movement of the 50’s, where their whirlwind interracial romance
in many respects parallels the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans, published immediately after On the Road in 1958. Considering her intelligence, what’s missing
is any commitment to social activism, as there is no reference whatsoever to
the social unrest caused by the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements
that dominated the news during that era.
Instead there are flashback
sequences to Baker playing at Birdland in New York, meeting a scowling young
Miles Davis (Kedar Brown) who condescendedly dismisses his playing as “sweet,
like candy,” asking Jane if this is her “Great White Hope,” before telling him
to come back in a few years after he’s “lived a little,” words that he takes to
heart, as he’s seen immediately afterwards mainlining heroin with a local girl
who supposedly turns him on for the first time.
Ironically, it was Baker’s quick ascension in jazz circles, using
techniques obviously inspired by Miles himself, that so angered Davis he was
finally motivated to quit his heroin dependency.
With an injured jazz player on the mend unable to play, the
two play house for a good deal of the film, much of it spent in an isolated
trailer situated on an idyllic cliff overlooking the ocean, like homesteaders
in love, offering a romanticized and dreamlike quality to the film, where he
could practice to the rhythms of the waves while attempting to regain some
semblance of sanity and sobriety with the constant encouragement of Jane, who
happens to believe that the feelings people have when they’re in love should be
their natural state of being. This
elevated state of existence works in a vacuum, lovers in a secret hideaway far
from the maddening world, where there’s a curious dichotomy taking place, as
the lure of the bright lights are everpresent, even from a distance, as Baker thinks
of nothing but making a comeback. While
the film is largely seen through her eyes, viewing Baker in all his glory,
warts and all, where his single-minded obsession is returning to a life in
music, it also doesn’t sugar coat his addictive habits, where he has to remain
straight as a condition of his parole.
There’s an interesting side trip to his parent’s farm in Yale, Oklahoma
where they spend some down time, reviving decades old personal feuds with his straight-laced
father (Stephen McHattie), still bitter about how his drug arrests have dragged
the family name through the mud. With an ocean of personal dissent between
them, the visit is quickly aborted, returning to their home on the beach where
Baker starts performing in tiny venues, like a local pizza establishment,
starting out a nobody, but quickly building up a following. There are, of course, obstacles in his path,
where his pesky parole officer (Tony Napo) hounds him to find a regular job,
constantly threatening to send him back to prison, where in a melodramatic
swoon, Baker actually suggests this kind of harassment is what led to the death
of Billie Holiday. Even if true, this is
amateurishly handled and feels more like name dropping, diminishing the
seriousness of the accusation to a near laughable moment. Driven to get back into the recording
business, he gets an opportunity to perform for a room full of influential
producers, playing the intimately personal Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine
YouTube (2:19), sung directly to Jane in one of the more poignant scenes of the
film. This sets the stage for a new
chapter, giving him the opportunity to return to Birdland, where the world
seemingly awaits. While the film is a
well-acted, impressionistic attempt to explore the intimate side of a jazz
legend, evoked through a diverse series of scenes at beaches, in café’s,
apartments, recording studios, and even film sets, it typically uses the
standard comeback story methodology, which feels diluted, where unfortunately
there isn’t a single note heard by the original artist, instead his solos are
replayed note for note in a similar style, which feels like an essential
missing component. Hawke does a credible
job singing in the manner of Baker, but the film shortchanges the audience by
leaving out any traces of the real thing.
