FILM OF THE WEEK: Everybody Digs Bill Evans -Reviewed by Roe McDermott

The traditional biopic of a creative genius often follows a linear structure, bringing us though the artists’ childhood, realisation of their talents, struggle for recognition, success, and then the inevitable existential crisis; a reckoning of what fame, success and art all really mean. This structure is comforting. It suggests that if we understand the path to brilliance, we might somehow understand the nature of genius itself. But Everybody Digs Bill Evans has a much tighter focus, and a much more interesting question: what happens to an artist when they can’t create?

Directed by Grant Gee and written by Mark O’Halloran, the film finds legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans in 1961, immediately after a period of extraordinary creative spark. Evans and his trio had played a series of genre-defining sets at New York’s Village Vanguard, recordings which would later become the seminal albums Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. But ten days after performing, Evans’ virtuoso bassist and close friend Scott LaFaro was in a car accident and died. He was 25 years old.

Wracked with grief, Evans became a shell of himself. Already in the throes of heroin addiction, he withdrew not only from music, but from life, for three months, living with family and visiting his girlfriend - a relationship filled with love but shrunk by addiction. The film is adapted from Welsh writer Owen Martell’s 2013 novel Intermission, and concentrates on this strange suspension in Evans’s life, jumping occasionally back and forth in time to show us the nature of memory and the impact of grief, but focusing largely on Evans’ ghost-like existence during this period, as days drift past him and his family try, in their own flawed and stumbling way, to help.

Anders Danielsen Lie is remarkable as Evans, all fragility and cheekbones and a sense of soul-deep exhaustion. He is a deeply interior character who does not explain his feeling s- one gets the sense he barely understands them himself, and with his music lost to him, unable to find any avenue to express them from his body, and so they flatten him. His presence feels incomplete, something fundamental about him missing and inaccessible. His best friend is gone, and so the music of his life has left.

Following a grief-stricken person who's unable to articulate themselves may not seem cinematic, but writer Mark O’Halloran is the perfect writer for this material. Across Adam & Paul, Garage, Viva, Rialto and The Virtues, he has repeatedly been drawn to people (mainly men) whose emotional lives exceed their ability to describe them. When a character’s life becomes defined by all which they cannot express, every moment becomes vital, every physical gesture an attempt, every glance a bid for help, for understanding, for connection, for change.

This theme on inarticulation and all that goes unsaid runs throughout the film. As Evans stays for periods with his brother and parents, regressing to a childlike state of vulnerability, the family’s seemingly ordinary conversation hold decades of unexpressed competition, pain, and concern. Evans’ mother (Laurie Metcalfe, superb) watches silently as her brilliant son sweats and writhes through withdrawal, the family narrative settling on the flu. Evans’ relationship with his brother and father is defined by the unexpressed. Barry Ward is excellent as his brother Harry, whose protectiveness towards Bill is tinged with jealousy of his talent and the disappointment of his own unrealised dreams. Evans’ father, expertly balanced by Bill Pullman, has an affability that conceals a darker temper and the awareness of how it had impacted the family in the past.

O’Halloran has long been interested in male loneliness, competition and the ways men can struggle to communicate intimacy to one another, but Everybody Digs Bill Evans notices the men’s tenderness they have for one another as well as the damage they can inflict. These men frequently fail each other, but they also turn up for each other, and keep trying, love filling the silence as much as everything else.

As the family settle into some ordinary rhythms of means, walks, gold, small-talk, and Evan receives some space from the pressure of performance, the obsessive nature of his creative routine, the addiction awaiting him in New York, and of course the prospect of playing music again with his friend, this period away from music becomes not just a break but existential questions: when music requires so much of him, will he survive returning to it? He is undoubtedly great, but is the cost of that greatness too much to bear? And if he didn’t return to his life of music in New York, what life could he have?

Cinematographer Piers McGrail’s work is beautiful, somehow making Cork stand in for both New York and Florida, moving between elegant monochrome and bleached colour as the timeline shifts. Gee’s use of this lightly fragmented but still fluid timeline evokes the structure of Evans’ music, the emotional beats of O’Halloran’s script landing lightly but building, motifs and moments recurring, all gathering meaning. The moments of silence in the film, where Danielsen Lie sits alone, or sits alongside someone who loves him but can’t quite reach him, are beautiful, evoking the moment between notes that lets their beauty sing.
The silence is needed. The pause between the music. The question that this beautiful restrained and sophisticated film asks is what will happen when the music starts again?

Directed by Grant Gee. Written by Mark O'Halloran, based on the novel Intermission by Owen Martell. Cinematography by Piers McGrail. Edited by Adam Biskupski. Music by Roger Goula. Starring Anders Danielsen Lie, Barry Ward, Bill Pullman, Laurie Metcalf, Valene Kane, Katie McGrath. 102 mins.

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