‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ Berlinale Review: Between the Vanguard and the Void
In the aftermath of a devastating personal loss, the jazz pianist retreats to his parents’ home in Florida, where he deals with his grief and depression.
The music of Bill Evans reflects, in more ways than one, the man himself. Introspective and soft-spoken, he carried himself with a kind of quiet heaviness that often masked a sadness bordering on depression. He’s been described as a perfectionist, emotionally fragile, melancholic, deeply self-critical, and not especially sociable. In its own understated way, Everybody Digs Bill Evans tries to channel all of those traits by zeroing in on one of the most difficult periods of the jazz pianist’s life, occasionally branching out to other equally troubled moments.
The stretch that anchors Grant Gee’s first narrative feature — a director best known for documentaries about famously unsmiling bands like Radiohead and Joy Division — is one of Evans’ most emotionally fraught. After recording two live shows with his trio at the Village Vanguard that would go on to become the most celebrated albums of his career up to that point, bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car accident. The film picks up in the aftermath, focusing on Evans’ (Anders Danielsen Lie) strained relationship with his girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane) and, especially, with his parents (Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf), with whom he retreats for a time to their home in Florida.
Based on the novel Intermission by Owen Martell, the film follows the uneasy stretch he spends there — his parents trying to lift his spirits and coax him back to the piano, while also generating tensions (particularly his father) that only deepen his malaise. His relationship with Ellaine grows more complicated, and Bill’s emotional reticence does little to help matters. Occasional flash-forwards to painful future events round out a tragic trajectory that would follow him until his early death in 1980.
Formally elegant, delicate, and hushed — with less music than one might expect and a dry sense of humor that lands when you least anticipate it (Pullman’s performance helps a great deal on that front) — Everybody Digs Bill Evans sketches a sorrowful, often painful portrait of a remarkably gifted jazz musician. Gee’s biggest challenge may be that the combination of Evans’ withdrawn personality and the film’s own emotional distance from him can make the result feel, at times, overly slow and muted. It certainly captures the emptiness brought on by the protagonist’s depression, but what that communicates to the viewer may register as monotony more than anguish.
Still, as a psychological portrait, it’s a smartly chosen slice of Evans’ life, placing one of his greatest recording triumphs alongside one of his lowest personal periods and firmly separating the two — to the point that he can’t even bring himself to listen to the album when his parents welcome him home. In that sense, it’s not unlike Deliver Me from Nowhere, the recent Bruce Springsteen biopic that also zooms in on a particularly conflicted, depressive chapter in the life of an artist at the height of his fame.
Everybody Digs… joins a growing list of films that focus on specific moments in the lives of jazz musicians — from the fiction feature Köln 75, about Keith Jarrett, to Mariano Galperín’s Bill 79, centered on Evans’ trip to Argentina following another devastating episode — the suicide of his brother Harry Evans — as well as Rewind & Play by Alain Gomis, which revisits a strange chapter in the life of Thelonious Monk, among others. Gee sidesteps the usual musician-biopic clichés to approach the artist from a more private, less familiar angle. The film may have its ups and downs — and a sometimes oppressive density — but that, too, is part of an artist’s life. Beyond the tours and the applause, there’s the silence that surrounds it all.
