In a recent interview in The New Yorker, Charlie Haden eloquently described the art of music as evoking “appreciation of life and how precious life really is.... Whether there’s sorrow and tears or happiness and joy, you’re reminded that you’re lucky to be here.” The statement applies to all genres of music, surely, but the effect of popular music is a little more complicated.
Yes, pop also has the power to tap into the fleeting passion that is life. (In fact, it may have more power than most music, because pop is keyed into the now, which is inherently transient.) But pop is more than just music; it’s culture and personality and, above all, promise. Pop has the potential to catch life as it has always been and magnify it through an instant, through a modern beat and a hip lyric. That potential—rarely realized—makes pop precious, and it makes it heartbreaking. The history of pop music is a history of disappointment: careers cut short, talent wasted, and great works dreamed of but gone unrecorded.
Although basically a light, spirited romp, the new rock ’n’ roll comedy That Thing You Do! is about the meteoric nature of pop, and the way it burns out the musicians who try to outrace its fiery wake. Set in the heady months just after The Beatles stormed American shores, That Thing You Do! follows a fictional Erie, Pa., garage band named The Wonders as they make the transition from gigging at pizza parlors to appearing on national television. The film is carefully plotted and skips no steps. We see the band think up a name (at first, they’re the hard-to-pronounce “Oneders”), win a battle-of-the-bands, cut a single, get signed by Play-Tone Records, tour state fairs, climb the charts, do a cameo in a movie, get to a real recording session, and disband. By my count, the whole process takes about two months.
That Thing You Do! was written and directed by Tom Hanks, who also has a small role in his film as Play-Tone promoter Mr. White. Like other celebrities of his generation—Billy Crystal, Bob Costas, and Dennis Miller spring to mind—Hanks has a wealth of knowledge about late ’50s/early ’60s cultural trivia, but his is not a blind, nostalgic admiration. For every affectionate reference to ’60s beach movies, there’s a faded chanteuse at the end of her career. For all the upbeat goodwill of The Wonders themselves, Hanks sows the seeds of their demise throughout.
Not that That Thing You Do! is at all a downer. If anything, it’s a relentless upper—a film without villains; the worst thing that happens is that a group of young men gets famous and then quickly returns to obscurity. Along the way, the music jumps, the cuts are quick, and the colors are bright. Hanks’ film is far from grim and just one level removed from deep, but it tells its story quite well. (Credit Hanks for the smoothness of the film, and wager that he was helped immeasurably by producer Jonathan Demme and his terrific cinematographer Tak Fujimoto.)
For levity, That Thing You Do! relies on its fresh, appealing young cast, including Hanks look-alike Tom Everett Scott as drummer Guy Patterson and Steve Zahn as wiseacre guitarist Lenny, whose bright-eyed sarcasm provides a welcome edginess. The weak link among the young performers is Liv Tyler, a rather vacant actress who serves the same purpose here as she did in Stealing Beauty—to recite her lines in a blank monotone, smile occasionally, and wander offscreen so the other characters can inexplicably describe her as “special.” Her Faye starts out with one Wonder but clearly belongs to another, and the tacked-on romantic subplot she’s involved in is the film’s only real false note.
Otherwise, That Thing You Do! is quite smart; Hanks is on his toes even with the smallest details. When The Wonders appear on the Hollywood Television Showcase, they are preceded by doomed astronaut Gus Grissom, who will himself flame out in a tragic launchpad accident in just a few years. When The Wonders’ bass player tells Mr. White that he has to leave the group in August to enter the Marines, the manager is unfazed, because he knows the band will be lucky to last that long. Hanks’ performance provides a real anchor to the movie. His Mr. White is a model of efficiency, telling the band just what they need to know to perform well, and mostly keeping the pragmatism that comes from his years of experience to himself.
The core strength of the film, though, is the same as with most movies about fictional rockers, from the otherwise goofy Eddie and the Cruisers to Allison Anders’ winning, urgent new film Grace of My Heart: Filmmakers get to offer an alternate pop history in which things work out a little cleaner and better than reality. A greaser star can work on a concept album about “A Season in Hell”; a Pennsylvania steel heiress can write oddly personal hit songs about ghetto life. The movies can suggest a mythical greatness of vision and sound that a real, full album of music rarely offers. That reimagining is a powerful fantasy, and one That Thing You Do! taps into as its clean-cut boys rocket to the hermetic comfort of money and fame on the basis of one catchy single. As we ride along, we play along, until it’s as if we’re back in front of our own bedroom mirrors with our hairbrush microphones, singing our insides out in a torrent of raw energy.
Early in the movie, The Wonders’ first manager describes rock ’n’ roll as a stew: If the right ingredients are added and cooked right, it’s delicious; if not, it’s soup. In That Thing You Do!, the group gets it together and makes stew for just one song, but while that song lasts, living is good—for the band, for the listener, and for the movie audience. We’re all lucky to be there.—Noel Murray
Heart and Soul
To a lot of pop-music chroniclers, the period between Elvis’ Army stretch and the Beatles’ arrival in the States is dead air, a wasteland ruled by white guys in sweaters. In defense, I offer just three words: “Be My Baby.” To hear the opening salvo of drumbeats on the Ronettes’ majestic 1963 single, to hear the marshaled forces of strings and choirs and hand claps swell behind Ronnie Spector’s pledge of love now and forever, is to feel your heart race once more with adolescent exhilaration and terror. The genius of “Be My Baby” and the other girl-group classics of the era—monolithic in sound, melodramatic in tone, distinctly urban in voice and vernacular—was that they viewed teenage despair and jubilation without a hint of irony. They spoke directly to, and for, their audience.
The new musical drama Grace of My Heart concerns the legendary producers and Brill Building songwriters who crafted these records, and in its best moments it shows how they struck such responsive chords in listeners’ hearts. The film’s fictionalized heroine is Edna Buxton (Illeana Douglas), a Philadelphia steel heiress who flees to New York in 1958 to pursue a singing career. The singing goes nowhere, but a producer recognizes her songwriting gifts, and Edna ends up at lunch with Joel Millner (John Turturro, stealing scenes like crazy), a temperamental genius who offers her a new name, a new biography, and a position as a staff writer. The movie follows the newly minted “Denise Waverly” on a course through the music scene of the ’60s, from a busted marriage with her piggish cowriter (Eric Stoltz) to an equally ill-fated union with a reclusive California wunderkind (Matt Dillon).
You don’t see many movies about songwriters for the same reason you don’t see many movies about novelists: It’s more exciting to watch someone use a Q-Tip than it is to watch her compose a sentence. But Grace of My Heart does a good job of capturing how exciting it must have been to work in the Brill Building, where cramped offices housed the best pop songwriters of the period. The early scenes bustle with color and energy, and the writer and director, Allison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging), amusingly shows how the songwriters’ social and political convictions clashed, melded, and ultimately emerged in three-minute pop songs meant to appeal to a broad audience. There’s even a terrific scene with a closeted teen queen (a funny, unexpectedly haunting cameo by Bridget Fonda) that depicts how endlessly suggestive those sweet pop nothings could be for lovers of all genders and persuasions.
The movie weakens considerably in its second half, when Edna/Denise moves to California with her Brian Wilson-like husband: The mood turns somber, the satire of hippie mysticism falls flat, and the scenes of domestic discord wade off into the same old A Star Is Born surf. The low budget really hurts here: Despite Jean-Yves Escoffier’s vibrant cinematography, which gives the movie an album-cover glow, a lot of the second half looks like it was shot in a state park.
The music, however, remains a constant delight. The filmmakers hit upon the novel idea of pairing ’90s performers with ’60s tunesmiths—Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach, Los Lobos with Gerry Goffin, David Baerwald with Lesley Gore—to recreate the Brill Building style, and the results are surprisingly potent. Writing for others brings out the songwriters’ directness and melodic gifts, just as it did for Carole King and Neil Diamond. It also adds to the fun of guessing whom the different characters represent in pop-music history—although the many musical touchstones shouldn’t be taken too literally. (The movie’s “River Deep, Mountain High” has one whacked-out prodigy too many, no offense to either Phil Spector or Brian Wilson.)
Grace of My Heart makes an interesting companion piece to Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do!, which takes place during the same mid-’60s period. In some ways, the movies are flipsides of the same experience: A hit-bound band member in That Thing You Do! chafes because he wants to record only his own material, and Edna/Denise longs for the day she can record her songs herself, instead of giving them to groups like the one Hanks depicts. What the two movies share is an affection for pop music and its poignant promise of a neverending now. The singers, the producers, and the listeners grow old together; only the music remains ageless. When Grace of My Heart and That Thing You Do! ended, I was surprised by what an extraordinary range of time, place, and incident they covered, and how hearing songs from either movie could conjure up such distinct memories. I don’t know how I’ll feel about either movie in 20 years: Something tells me their recreated past will come to seem a lot more dated than the best music of the time they celebrate. Right now—in the moment, where all things pop must flourish—I like them just fine.—Jim Ridley
