“Everybody Digs Bill Evans”, Biopic Without Jazz

Everybody Digs Bill Evans, premiered at the 76th Berlinale, recounts an episode in the life of the legendary jazz pianist (played by Anders Danielsen Lie, who also co-produced the film), when the death of his bassist and musical soulmate, Scott LaFaro, plunged him into depression and artistic catatonia.

The celestial trio that recorded two of the most fundamental albums in the history of jazz during their concerts at the Village Vanguard came to an end in a car accident, and Bill Evans’s career came to an abrupt halt. British director Grant Gee undertakes his first fiction feature after his documentary trilogy consisting of The Gold Machine, Patience (After Sebald), and Innocence of Memories. Known for his music documentaries such as Joy Division and Meeting People Is Easy, about Radiohead, he approaches Evans’s personal crisis through twenty-year time jumps, marked by distinct stylistic choices. The alternation between black and white and color—the former for the segments beginning in June 1961 in New York and the latter for the various episodes leading up to his death in 1980—accompanied by the remarkable cinematography of Piers McGrail, is the film’s most striking feature. Even the highly saturated color treatment presents a bearded, relapsed, and weakened Evans, visually emphasizing his deterioration.

The coldness and lack of depth in the character who should carry the film are striking, leaving a sense of disappointment—made even more evident by contrast with the sharp construction of his father’s character, which Bill Pullman embodies with remarkable solidity. The pianist’s mother offers him a metaphor, suggesting that silence is also part of music; yet the pause Grant Gee portrays is pure post-traumatic silence, revealed in the moments when Evans is unable to play or when he regains the ability to do so. The figure who drifts through one hour and forty-two minutes could just as easily be a musician as an architect, because his personality is not defined through art but through actions.

We are not given access to his inner world, his relationship with LaFaro or with his brother (played by Barry Ward), nor—most importantly—a character shaped by music. At no point are we shown the soul of an artist, a creative process or a creative block (only the outcome), nor how Bill Evans experiences music: its integration into his life, its demands, the happiness or the tyranny attached to genius.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an elegant film, soberly acted, photographed, and narrated, yet it is a biopic in which the subject is absent—and there is no jazz.