While not a sugarcoating hagiography, and more a matter-of-fact, told through the eyes flashback of the band using rare, extemporaneous footage (no new band interviews are utilized), Tom DiCillo’s “When You’re Strange,” his documentary about Jim Morrison and The Doors is mildly interesting and simultaneously totally forgettable.
The film is captivating for the rare footage displayed (including what appears to be a unmade short film about Morrison taking a car on a wild joy ride and never-before-seen live and studio footage) but DiCillo’s gaze at the band through the lens of counter cultural tumult just feels all too familiar and at times a little unremarkable. And if people complained at Sundance ’09 about DiCillo’s anemic voiceover, then Johnny Depp’s unsentimental reading of the band is just slightly less narcoleptic.
It doesn’t help that the oooh mystical Doors have aged poorly and moreso than most, if not all, of their ’60s/’70s contemporaries, so it seems odd that DiCillo tries to frame the band as one of the most dangerous against a prosaic backdrop of Vietnam protest, Richard Nixon conservatism and bohemian reverie. Though to be honest this writer now appreciates all their soft, schmaltzy ballads which are the only musically interesting elements of the band that don’t feel played out as cornball leather pants acid rock (think “The Crystal Ship” and “The Hyacinth House”).
The band were original by default. A jazz drummer, a boogie woogie keyboard dude, a Spanish flamenco guitarist and a wannabe poet trying to square-peg some rock’ n roll with their unconventional mix of talent, but some of the live footage doesn’t do them much good, illustrating them as a noodly psych band jamming live onstage endlessly (which was even worse when their singer was soused out of his mind and making a jackass out of himself and the band sounded like they were each playing three different songs).
The documentary enlightens a little, Morrison was rebelling against a hardass Navy father and the band got by without a bass player because multi-nerd hyphenate Ray Manzarek could play twelve different keyboard lines at once, but there are no major revelations unless you consider Morrison devolving into drunken, self-destructive buffoonery some kind of secret.
Structurally the film is clunky, a bit scattered and at times just plain lazy like marijuana smoke drifting here and there. DiCillo knows his subject well, but let’s the narrative wander (not a surprise then that its his first documentary).
Named after an Aldous Huxley novel, The Doors likely fancied themselves a freaky and experimental leap into the void of perception, but the documentary does little to illuminate them as anything more than a curious little blip on the ’60s/’70s rock roadmap that had a brief incandescent moment. For some, the doc may wash away the cartoon that was Oliver Stone’s vilified ’90s narrative film (still much more entertaining than this rather quotidian effort), but unless you’re a flower power child still clinging to old issues of Cream, “When You’re Strange” is hardly going to break you on through to some mysterious other side. [C+]
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
