Subject: The Ballad Of Ramblin' Jack --the film review
From:
Joe Offer
Date: 15 Sep 00 - 07:57 PM
Art Thieme asked me to post this review, written by a friend of his.
-Joe Offer-
BALLAD OF A SAD ROUE
Film Criticism: by Warren Leming
The Ballad of Rambling Jack
Directed by Alyana Elliott
Music: Jack Elliott
Lot 47 Films
Running Time: 105 minutes
Featuring: Odetta, Pete Seeger, Dave Von Ronk, Arlo and Nora Guthrie, and Kris Kristofferson.
"As through this life I've rambled: I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."
(Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw: Woody Guthrie)
I first encountered the already legendary Jack Elliott in the winter of 1961, in Champaign, Illinois; the bleak college town where Elliott and a French girlfriend had been coughed up, courtesy of a faulty oil-pan, in the midst of a cross country journey. Elliott was showing the lady his version of America. Elliott and his lady remained with us, in an unheated back room on Stoughton Street, for some of that winter. In exchange for room and board, we got to witness his unending drollery, songs, and guitar.
I had first heard Elliott on a ten-inch compilation EP issued sometime in the late Fifties, singing and flat-picking a version of the Ballad of Jesse James. The record revealed him a superb guitarist, who had mastered that flat, adenoidal Southwestern twang natural to Woody Guthrie; a man whom Elliott befriended and came to idolize. The accent was not native to Elliott, born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York; the son of a doctor. But that cowboy drawl does illustrate Elliott's natural and extraordinary mimetic gift. He has a fantastic ear, and can duplicate anything spoken or sung that he happens to hear.
Aiyana Elliott is the daughter of Jack Elliott, and in the course of this film she sets out to document her fathers peripatetic life-style and her attempts to have some "quality time" with the ever- elusive Dad who bedeviled her childhood. Elliott was often a no-show parent, as recounted ad nauseam by Elliott's daughter and ex-wife. The film's premise is a staple of documentary diet since Michael Moore did Roger and Me; the tale of a single quest for an elusive, deceptive figure, whose pursuit and evasions form the spine of the documentary.
The New York Times reviewer (Stephen Holden) finds that at the core of the film are Mr. Elliott's "mania for self invention," and the story of a man "unable to meet his most basic family responsibilities." Happily for the morally improving Times, Mr. Elliott's life veers from the platitudes of Middle Class normative with an alarming regularity. As Ms. Elliott interrogates her father, she begins to reveal, both to Elliott and the viewer, just why the quest for an identity which must always elude her, has come to dominate and dilute so much of America's cultural life. Elliott's daughter is a pure, earnest example of the terrible, frustrated sibling culture-now a Hollywood staple, theatrical and Performance cliché, and inescapable tool of American television. Whole generations of Americans out there now, producing, writing and directing-for whom mom and dad take on the proportions of Zeus and Hera: the twin Gods who soiled their lives and must pay and pay and pay (with the rest of us.)
The Times reviewer defines the singer as a "purist" whose lack of commercial success is due to his purity. This is the classic condescension paid to artists by a bogus Art culture now so dominated by corporate imagery and lore that it has acquired Capitalist amnesia.
Elliott is one of the aging representatives of an East Coast Bohemian scene which rejected corporate life; Capitalism, and the Bourgeois media. The film does not touch on this and omits a number of salient points, most tellingly: Guthrie's radical Communism; the large Left culture which made New York, from the Twenties on, a place termed "Little Moscow," and Elliott's own romantic version of Left politique.
Unlike Guthrie, whom he imitated and revered, Elliott's politics are those of the Beatnik inspired wanderers of the Fifties: a fascination with the Road-as spiritual source. It's an American tendency traceable to Walt Whitman: "The only home of the soul is the open road."
Elliott, the product of a narrow, stifling home, from childhood on was fascinated by Americana. For him this took the form of the cowboy (once our most enduring myth), the folksong, trucking and ranching, and a love of the sea. It's the most anti-employee agenda imaginable, now barely left alive in a corporate world, which has radically reworked all of those ideas. The cowboy got reworked to the Marlboro man; the folksong was sanitized and made academic; trucking and ranching are highbrow nostalgia, and as for the lure of the Road, it's a staple of "Jet Set" promo. To say that Elliott's legacy and life have been distorted to the point of twisted contusion is to put it lightly. It's a wonder the singing cowboy has survived a United States where all of what he came from has disappeared in the face of rampant advertised distortion and the cop-out that someone like Dylan represents.
Dylan, once a disciple of both Guthrie and Elliott, is now a millionaire, gloomily brooding on his love life, when not doing highly paid benefits for firms out of Silicon Valley. This was not to be Elliott's fate. This is not to suggest that Elliott is in any way consciously, unlike Pete Seeger or Ewan McColl, political.
The saddest aspect of the film is Elliott's bemused reflection on why he failed to achieve a significant stardom while Dylan went on to mansions in Malibu, expensive divorce, and Playboy prose accolade. Here we discover that Elliott absorbed a great deal from Guthrie, but not his well-honed hatred of a System based on stardom, alienation, and investment advisors. Guthrie once composed a song, whose sole lyric was:
"I hate your Capitalist system."
The film is proof that consciousness is losing ground.
Elliott's daughter has a penchant for whining, which can veer to grousing yammer in mid-sentence. She is testament to the strident, pathetic, perpetual adolescence now at the epicenter of American culture. That Elliott can endure the endlessly repeated interrogations about how and why Mom and Dad's marriage did not work out is testament to a man who can field with the best, and give, as occurs in one on-mike exchange, as well as he gets.
Elliott, a charismatic, handsome cabaret performer with a significant body of recorded work, has been married four times. His disorganization and irresponsibility can be pronounced, and are seen as evidence, not of his insistence on spontaneous improvisation-which he has extended to a life principle, but as telling evidence of his inability to make big money.
The singer has been poor for much of his life, and was apparently, for a time, drug dependent. Inexplicable to some, the filmmaker included, in a world where celebrity is now assumed to be a profitable extension of one's commodity status. An ex-wife at one point comments on Elliott's "interest in so many things," as reason why Elliott did not achieve what Dylan's "focus" brought him: pop-stardom and financial reward beyond mere avarice. A man's worst enemies, as the Good Book notes, are often from his own House.
In 1998, Clinton awarded Elliott the National Medal of Arts, after he released an award-winning album: South Coast.
Elliott is pushing 70, and stands unbowed and with considerable wit, the unabashed Brooklyn cowboy, a man who-(and here is the hard part) never seems to have betrayed what is at the heart of his life and music: the songs, and style of an Okie Communist who died broken and betrayed by a System he fought all of his life. Guthrie remains the great, American anti-Capitalist poet of the 20th century.
That Guthrie's legacy remains battered but still intact is part of Elliott's gift to the Republic. It has been a considerable feat.
(Warren Leming is a writer/critic who lives in Berlin and Chicago.)
|
sj
