Heart of the Matter
Documentary about rock band Wilco has moments of excitement, but lacks depth or context
If you want to read some outstanding rock journalism, dig up Paul Cantin’s article about Wilco that appeared in the May-June 2002 issue of No Depression. For about a year previous, the media had been quietly buzzing about Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—how it had been completed and submitted to Warner/Reprise in the summer of 2001, and how the label had deemed the record unworthy of a financially risky promotional push, and so agreed to release from their contract perhaps the most acclaimed American band of the past half-decade. But only Cantin’s version had the exhaustive detail and nuance that the story required, including the internal complications that led bandleader Jeff Tweedy to dismiss drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist guru Jay Bennett around the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s creation.
Sam Jones’ documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart covers the same time period as Cantin’s article. Though it’s beautifully shot in grainy black-and-white, and though it’s at times a viscerally exciting portrait of a very good rock band, as journalism the film is a dud. Granted, a movie can’t do what a magazine piece can, in terms of untying knotty histories in a few terse paragraphs and using choice phrases to capture vague emotional states. But it’s not too much to expect a documentarian to ask a few pertinent questions. Jones includes footage of Wilco in the studio and in concert, and a few interviews with the principals about the label woes and personality conflicts, but the director maintains a frustrating distance from the fundamentals of the band’s crisis.
Early scenes show Tweedy, Bennett and company trying variations on the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot material, doing an acoustic version of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and a rocked-up version of “Kamera” that are arguably superior to the final album versions. The band talk about the problems of experimenting, of how the more they think about the different ways to play and record their songs, the harder it is to decide the best way. But if Jones ever asked Tweedy how he ultimately chose, the filmmaker failed to include the question or the answer in the film. Tweedy makes a vague comment at one point about the album feeling right to him, but he never pins down the reason. And since the final, “difficult” versions of these songs are what caused Wilco so much trouble, not knowing precisely why they had to be so abrasive saps any understanding of what’s at stake for the band.
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart succeeds as drama only when the band are in the studio, sweating out small changes and passive-aggressively bickering over matters of control. (If nothing else, the film makes plain why the fussy, assertive Bennett wasn’t going to be able to keep making music alongside the more pensive Tweedy.) The record label controversy doesn’t hold the same fascination, in part because Jones has to rely on talking heads to explain the situation in self-serving, half-articulate fashion, and in part because he keeps interrupting the action with entertaining but pointless live performances.
To be fair to Jones, the No Depression article is also scant on the nuts and bolts of the creative process, though Cantin makes up the difference by giving the reader a thorough, honest explication of how Wilco survived a series of near-fatal wounds. In the absence of a strong, clear narrative, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart needs more cultural and musical context than the small handful of critics and fans who praise Wilco’s iconoclasm but say little about why that makes their music any good. A clear antecedent for the film is D.A. Pennebaker’s 1966 Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, which owes its reputation primarily to the elusiveness of its subject, captured in the bloom of his youth, but unwilling (or unpushed) to explain himself. For all its hype, Don’t Look Back is incomplete. Similarly, 30-plus years from now, rock fans will turn to I Am Trying to Break Your Heart to see and hear what Wilco were all about; but if they want the whole story, they’ll need to get some ink on their fingers.
—Noel Murray
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