SHINE A LIGHT ssDirected by Martin Scorsese
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For a certain white-male demographic, Shine a Light is a match made in heaven—who better to toughen up the Stones than Scorsese, who’s used their songs in Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed? For this project he wisely talked the band into staging an intimate, New York-themed show instead of the gigantic open-air concert in Rio de Janeiro that Mick Jagger wanted him to film. Scorsese knows how to shoot and edit live music—he worked on Woodstock (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972) and turned the Band’s farewell show into the elegiac The Last Waltz (1978), still a marker in the concert-doc genre. Shine a Light bills him as a costar, and in the production sequence before the concert he does his usual hyperactive shtick, comically fretting as he waits for Jagger to issue a last-minute set list. But he’s even more of a presence once he disappears behind the cameras, skillfully coordinating an all-star crew that includes Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter), Robert Richardson (The Aviator), and Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood).
Their attention to details of personality and musicianship allow Scorsese and editor David Tedeschi to create a strong sense of onstage space. The Stones are tight as usual, playing with vigor and an easy rapport developed over decades. But anyone looking for a human drama on the level of The Last Waltz will be disappointed: for the Stones this is just one more concert and, for that matter, one more film in a collection of dozens, including work by Robert Frank (Cocksucker Blues), Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One), and Hal Ashby (Let’s Spend the Night Together). The best, Gimme Shelter (1970), centers on the Hell’s Angels’ stabbing of a black audience member at the Altamont Speedway concert in 1969; in Shine a Light the band gathers onstage after the sound check for a meet-and-greet with Bill Clinton and members of his foundation, which benefited from the two shows filmed. Who’d have thought Ronnie Wood would get on so well with Hillary’s mom?
Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone. But even in that respect Curtis Mayfield set a more impressive example. In August 1990 a lighting rig fell on him as he was performing an outdoor concert in Brooklyn and left him paralyzed from the neck down. Six years later he came back with a final album, New World Order, which he sang lying on his back, one line at a time. “Welfare takes the tab and Daddy can’t sign,” he laments in the title song. “And can’t be seen, the family becomes a crime / The hunt is on and brother you’re the prey / Serving time in jail, it just ain’t the way.” His chorus hijacks a George H.W. Bush slogan, demanding “a new world order… a change of mind for the human race.”v
Movin’ On Up
Opens Fri 4/4 at Navy Pier IMAX and other theaters.
Fri-Sat 4/4-4/5, 7 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. F
