Pictures Go Wild In A Rush Of Wind

.

Seven years ago when this blog was still in its infancy was when I first posted about a Jeff Buckley bio-pic, but at that point it was something I'd already been wanting to see for years - Grace came out my junior year of high school and the album consumed me; for me it was one of those foundational pieces of music that we all have. This was way before covering "Halleluiah" became an American Idol staple - nobody around me was listening to Jeff, and he felt like mine for an eensy weeny little while. And what a somebody to have! The way that voice just sails to the outer space. I fancied myself a poet for awhile in those heady confused late teen years and I stole so so much from him. My first screenplay centered around some lyrics from "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," for god's sake. He was manna to a sexually repressed English major looking for soul-eyed and sensitive sexy New York City romance. 

So what I'm saying is, I had some ideas about a Jeff Buckley bio-pic going into Greetings From Tim Buckley last night, and that was probably, for Greetings From Tim Buckley, sadly disastrous. We - me and this movie - were not made to be. Every choice just seemed kind of inexplicable to me - this was not the story I wanted to be watching. In the Q&A after the film Penn Badgley said that was his first reaction to reading the script - he'd thought himself a good fit for Jeff for a long time and reading the script he said that this story was not the angle he'd been expecting a movie on him to take at all; where Penn and I differ is he thought this was an artful expression of what made Jeff Jeff, while I found it to be a bunch of microscopic navel-gazing that made me forget why I even liked Jeff Buckley in the first place.

It wasn't so much Penn's fault - I think with a script I'd found compelling he might've made a very fine Jeff. He's got a lovely voice and a lovely face and here and there I felt The Idea Of Jeff Buckley that I had going in was staring back at me. And I get it, that this preconceived notion inside my head might've actually inoculated me against anything the filmmaker was trying to get at that I found off-topic. I mean, Imogen Poots is a perfectly lovely screen presence and she sold me what she was selling too - I just have no idea why that's what I was being sold. Or what the film's profound point with any of it was. Maybe sadly the reality of it is it's just Jeff's music that made him interesting. I think that's a sad thing to come out of the movie thinking, but that's where I am.

But hey, I went home and piled a bunch of Jeff's music back onto my iPod, so its not all for naught. Me and he'll be over there whispering our own sweet sensitive sexy New York City nothings to each other, and I like that just fine. He can still be my dream brother; let's keep all this tepid reality at bay.

.