BOLDEN D-
USA (108 mi) 2019 d:
Daniel Pritzger Bolden
the Movie Official Page
In the making for well over a decade, starting the shoot
with Anthony Mackie in the lead role, but those initial plans were scrapped in
an attempt to shoot a film in the same freewheeling manner as one plays jazz
music, but the result is a disaster, as the end product is brutally amateurish,
poorly written, edited, and directed, where no performances stand out, instead
this is a muddled conglomeration bordering on a mess about one of America’s
great original artists, New Orleans’ jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, uniquely
attributed as the originator of American jazz, “the most powerful trumpet
player I’ve ever heard, or ever was known,” according to Jelly Roll Morton on
an Alan Lomax Library of Congress recording, though very little is known about
him, actually playing the cornet, remaining a mythological figure in history
who spent the last 24 years of his life confined to a Louisiana State Mental
Hospital with no visits from musicians or historical archivists. His institutionalization occurred 10 years
before the first jazz recording was made in 1917. While jazz did not originate from a single
individual, the early New Orleans pioneers that played with Bolden in the late
1890’s, King Oliver and Bunk Johnson, who later mentored Louis Armstrong, all
attribute Bolden as the leading figure, with clarinetist Alphonse Picou proclaiming,
“He was the loudest there ever was because you could hear Buddy’s cornet as
loud as what Louis Armstrong played through the mike, ” while Bunk Johnson
claimed Bolden was “a good-looking brown-skinned man, tall and slim and a
terror with the ladies.” Jelly Roll
Morton often claimed he invented jazz, but he came “after” Bolden and would
have been only ten-years old during Bolden’s era, though Morton was the first
jazz composer, as he was the first to write down his jazz arrangements, with
many of his compositions becoming jazz staples.
The best place to start may be the impressionistic stream-of-conscience novel
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael
Ondaatje, his first published work in 1976, which is not so much an accurate
depiction of Bolden’s life, but a poetic rendering of his improvisational attitude,
revealing there are no known recordings of his playing, but there is an audio
recording of trumpet player Bunk Johnson whistling in the style of Bolden. The definitive book on Bolden remains In Search of Buddy Bolden by Donald
Marquis in 1978, the result of more than a decade of painstaking research, a
landmark work of scholarship and a seminal work in jazz history. This film pales in comparison, with little
redeeming value.
The problem here is not the story, but the director and storyteller,
an overprivileged white man who inherited billions from his father who made his
fortune founding the Hyatt hotel chain, where Pritzger, the director and
co-writer, is among the top 400 richest Americans, hardly a man with insight
into Buddy Bolden’s circumstances growing up black and poor around the turn of
the century, throwing in $30 million dollars of his own money to make the
picture. This is precisely the problem
in Hollywood, as the wrong people are assigned to the majority of the stories,
basically preventing someone better qualified for the job, where the final
product has no earthly connection to the source material, but is a non-linear, disjointed,
and surreal mess that is largely incoherent, including blatantly sexist and
sadistically demeaning racist material, something no black director would
include but whites have no problem with, as they’re not really savvy about the
racial implications of depicting so much white hatred onscreen, as it’s overly
heavy handed, literally pummeling viewers, rubbing their faces in the stench, more
of a figment of the director’s imagination, turning this into a white man’s
fantasy, which isn’t remotely as interesting, bringing little original thought
to the material, where most of the spoken material was recorded so poorly that
it sounds garbled, losing any hope of connecting this story to a wider
audience, where Buddy Bolden deserved better.
Making no attempt to connect Bolden’s music to the black church, where
it was spawned, or to funerals, with second liners marching with the coffin in
a spirited public musical procession, with parades incorporated into the musical
history of New Orleans, instead Pritzger presents Bolden (played by Gary Carr) not
as an innovator or an experimenter but as a finished product, as the baddest
dude on the block who could outplay anyone else, standing down all opposition,
like testosterone-filled freestyle battle rappers or poetry slammers, which may
very well have been true, but this is presented with a 21st century mentality,
as if Bolden was a god, worshipped in his neighborhood, where every dance step
is fully choreographed, every woman a man’s dream, everybody in perfect sync
and harmony, bearing no resemblance to gritty backstreet dance halls, where
Bolden played in the black prostitution district known as Back o’ Town, getting
down and dirty, as opposed to Storyville which was frequented by whites, yet
this is clearly a white guy trying to imagine himself being black, with all the
perfections and idealizations of the white world, which were nonexistent in
Bolden’s segregated life where Jim Crow ruled supreme. Nicknamed King Bolden, his band packed the
halls on sweltering Saturday nights, as churches turned into dance halls after
Sunday morning services, becoming so rank and funky that they had to push open
the windows to let the foul air out.
There’s no hint of that in Pritzger’s film, filled instead with quick
cuts and jagged edges, where even the music (played by Wynton Marsalis) comes
in short bursts and is continually edited and interrupted, never establishing
that free flow of spontaneity that his genius was all about.
Granted, there is a single scene that shows creative
thought, with Bolden as a young boy lying on the ground in the garment factory
where his mother worked, where in his mind all the factory sounds are heard in
rhythm, literally orchestrating music in his imagination. But more importantly, much of this film seems
to take place in the darkened corridors of the mental asylum where Bolden
languished endlessly for years, most likely in a vegetative state due to the
primitive conditions of the time, yet Pritzger’s film imagines what he might
have been thinking, piecing together fragmented memories, mostly told in bizarre,
abruptly occurring flashbacks that jump around in no apparent order, creating
an emotional disconnect with deliriously violent overtones, using far too many Battle
Royale boxing scenes, with white promoters using extraordinarily large black
men for public spectacle, analogous to slave auctions, watching them beat each
other to death, where black men getting pulverized in the ring is geared
towards white entertainment, with these imaginings presented as if he was still
capable of coherent thought. Louis
Armstrong made a radio appearance just 5 months before Bolden’s death, the
first time a black musician spoke on the radio, where Pritzger gets the bright
idea to have Bolden hear in the asylum what is essentially his own music, but
played by someone else, as if this would revitalize the man from a catatonic
state, making him see the light. Instead
he creates a mish mosh of splintered recollections, trying to piece together a
story, where confusion and degradation is all that really comes across from the
screen. When they attempt to show his
mental breakdown, everything is over-exaggerated, sentimentalized and melodramatic,
reduced to pitiful suffering, losing his ability to play, unable to face the
crowds, instead lying in bed all day and wallowing in a state of depression,
growing paranoid that others would steal his music, which is one reason he
refused to write it down (the other is he couldn’t read music), but inevitably
they throw in the pathetic stereotypical evils of heroin and heavy narcotics
(seemingly a requirement in Hollywood depictions of people of color), as if
drugs rattled his already embattled mind (more likely it was cheap alcohol), having
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) hallucinogenic nightmares, sending him into
schizophrenic fits of delusions, losing all contact with reality, where his
worst fears are realized, as others are playing his music in the same clubs he
used to play, before the same audiences, yet no one attributes the music to
him, and he’s not seeing a dime, languishing in anonymity where he no longer
recognizes himself. The film is not so
much a celebration of his life as an impressionistic mosaic of his nightmarish demise,
like a descent into hell, from which there is no return. It’s a tragic downfall, considering the
heights he achieved, believing he was making “church music better,” taking it
to another level, mixing ragtime with the blues, adding soaring gospel riffs, where
according to the director, “his use of syncopation (landing hard on the fourth
beat), flatting the third note of the scale (common in blues music) shows he
operated differently than other horn players of the time.” The only known photo of him was taken with
his band in 1905.
