I
have been weeping more or less continuously for the last 3 and a half hours.
It is 2:30 a.m. on a work night. I have been watching Almost
Famous. It’s taken me three and a half hours to get through this two hour
and 5 minute film, gasping and sniffling and replaying scenes, hunching wracked
with sobs over the computer desk where I sit watching.
I
don’t know if this is the greatest rock and roll movie ever made.
Probably it is not. Come to think of it, that’s a fun bucket list
to contemplate – Rock and Roll Movies You Gotta See Before You Die: Gimme
Shelter, The Filth and the Fury, Woodstock, The Other F Word, I Ain’t In This
For My Health, The Wall, The Last Waltz, Sid and Nancy, Austin to Boston, Let It
Be, Kurt and Courtney..,.hell, even Rattle and Hum, and a gazillion others
(reply or comment with suggestions, PLEASE!). Sorryass sap that I am, I
am prone to weep at frequent moments during any of these flicks.
But
this one, this gift to all of us from Cameron Crowe — well this tale, in this
telling, operates on another order of spiritual, psychic, deep-center-of-marrow
magnitude altogether…
It’d
been several years since I screened the flick – maybe 5 or 6. I have no
idea how many times I’ve seen the film, not because I’ve watched it all that
many times, but because even if I’d only seen it once, every sound, sight, and
scene — an relentless tear-blurred swirl moving from music to family to friends
to sex to rock and roll to writing to love— every fucking thing in the film, is
tapped so cuttingly into such fundamental parts of my own brain and heart that
they are not so much carved into my psyche as seem to spring from it.
I’ve always been a hot mess for this flick. But this time around--
at age 51-- even moreso. And now, finally, here at 2:30 a.m. a
weeping mess as William walks through the airport defeated—his story falsely
denied by the band, humiliated, exhausted, alone— I understand, specifically
and in a single word, why this movie squashes me so:
longing.
This
is not first and foremost a movie about rock and roll or being famous or not
being famous or writing or love. This is a movie about longing, which
uses all of other those things to explore, express and convey that feeling,
viscerally, overwhelmingly. We all long for something, and methinks this
movie hits me so hard because I long for more than I realize or care to
admit. In the end, at 51, I’m longing
for many of the same damn things as the people in this movie, even though they’re
all terrifying number of years (numbers of decades!) younger than me. At 2:30 in the morning, I feel like I have
been watching these people run around naked—totally exposed— for hours while
they have been run through a grueling, heartbreaking ordeal trying to sate
their various longings—for art, for acceptance, for companionship, for meaningful
relationships with people in their lives.
Because music— rock and roll music— is so central to the film and also so deeply
rooted in my spirit and because it is also the thread that binds all of these
people together and pulls the story along, I feel like I have been run naked
through the same ordeal. No wonder this one crushes me.
I gotta go to
bed.
