Two Movies About Musical Geniuses

 Recently I saw the documentary about Jon Batiste, American Symphony, an astonishingly talented and intelligent young musician, as well as the biographical drama film about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro. Both of the movies are focused on the protagonists' dramatic and sometimes conflicted personal lives. In the case of Jon Batiste, while he is skyrocketing to success as a musician, his wife, Suleika Jaouad, is struggling with leukemia, and, as the movie progresses, we don't know any more than he did while the film was being made whether she would live or die. Leonard Bernstein is shown as a bisexual man whose extramarital homosexual affairs come close to destroying the happy married life he simultaneously strove to maintain.

Both artists are incredibly versatile and energetic, extremely gifted and hard working. Bernstein's legacy is monumental. Batiste is likely to garner similar achievements. Their musical talent is backed up by extensive study. Batiste has an advanced degree from Juilliard. Bernstein studied conducting and piano at the Curtis Institute after his BA in music at Harvard. Neither man sprang full form from the forehead of Zeus. However, the films hardly touched on their education at all.

What does emerge from the films is the factor of ego, personality, drive, and showmanship. Not every super talented musician has the flamboyant ambition of Bernstein and Batiste. Very few people can withstand the pressures of careers like theirs. Without the more modest talents and ambitions of the musicians who play with them and others in their retinues, they would be unable to achieve what they do. Partly they are egomaniacs who thrive on adulation. But they are also infinitely generous of their gifts.

"The American" starring George Clooney

I'll start by admitting that I enjoyed it.

Clooney is a fine actor, the scenery was beautiful, and so were the two main actresses. However, the plots of some movies, if you poke at them, fall apart completely, and "The American" is that kind of film.

Just one example: about halfway through the film someone (a Swede) arrives in the photogenic Italian mountain village where Jack, the Clooney character, is laying low. There is a gun fight, an innocent bystander is killed, and Clooney eventually shoots the Swede. Now, if such a thing happened in "real life" in a tranquil Italian village, the police would undoubtedly swarm all over it the following day, and they would obviously question the mysterious and reticent American "photographer" who had taken up residence there. But two people are killed in the village, a local citizen and a Swedish assassin, and the police take no apparent notice.

However, I'm more interested in the metaplot, as it were.

In the first 5 minutes of the movie, gunmen first as Jack, but he kills both of them, as well as a Swedish woman he had been sleeping with in an isolated cabin in the snowy woods. The audience, naturally sympathetic to the character played by the star, assumes that she had betrayed Jack to the killers, but later on he admits that she was "a friend," not implicated in betrayal, and we have to figure out by ourselves why he killed her.

Throughout the movie Jack is apparently tormented by this crime, though he never comes out and says so. That, of course, is the film's saving grace: Clooney manages to convey the turmoil of Jack's conscience in silent tension and reticent conversations with a kindly priest.

I immediately realized that Jack had to die at the end of the film. That's an iron-clad rule of films of this genre. A problematic hero, who murders someone at the beginning of a movie, has to be killed at the end. A happy ever after would violate the conventions of this kind of thriller.

However, think of how interesting the movie would have been if Jack had not been fatally wounded in the final gun fight, if he had managed to run away with Clara, the redeemed prostitute (another unbearable cliche), and they had found some safe haven, married, and started a family. Each would have borne a terrible secret into his or her new life: Jack's violent past as a hired killer and his guilt as a murderer, and Clara's past as a prostitute! Suppose the movie were narrated from the point of view of a child of theirs, a young adult, who suddenly figures out that her parents' life story just doesn't fit together and tries to find out the truth.

That would be a movie worth seeing.