Música: Satchmo’s Story, Music Substituting for Words
“Louis,“ a film about the young Louis Armstrong, was shown at the Apollo with live music by Wynton Marsalis, center, flanked by Vincent Gardner, left, and Marcus Printup.
By NATE CHINEN
Published: August 31, 2010
During the epilogue of “Louis,” an energetic but muddled new silent film that played at the Apollo Theater on Monday night, a wide-eyedLouis Armstrong arrives at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, confronted for the first time with a functional New Orleans institution, and the prospect of discipline. He’s being lectured, sternly but kindly, by the home’s band director, Prof. Peter Davis. The film is nearing a close, in other words, but Armstrong’s story as we know it is poised to begin.
“Louis,” directed by Dan Pritzker, is a picaresque set against Armstrong’s boyhood, in a streetscape of prostitutes and scoundrels. With a pace and cinematic language openly inspired by Charlie Chaplin, it’s as much a riff on silent movies as it is a coming-of-age tale with a whiff of political farce. But the main draw at the Apollo, as in the few other places around the country where the movie has screened, was a live accompaniment by Wynton Marsalis, whose repurposed music makes up much of the soundtrack.
Strictly on its musical merits, this made for excellent entertainment. Mr. Marsalis was in his wheelhouse, playing the trumpet with a 10-piece band whose members were mostly drafted from the ranks of his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
They addressed a selective range of his works, articulate and soulful, along with chestnuts by Armstrong, Duke Ellington and a few others. And they shared the stage with Cecile Licad, a classical pianist who delved authoritatively into period pieces by the Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The patchwork nature of the score meant that timing was absolutely critical, and the musicians, conducted by Andy Farber, hit every mark.
But that was just their baseline requirement. Silent-movie accompaniment, like circus music, is inherently an art of synchronization: it’s about sharpening the idea of a gunshot, a pratfall, a sudden reveal. Mr. Marsalis and his band also tapped into deeper currents of compatibility, bringing added dimension to the images with brassy crosstalk and brightly percolating rhythm.
The chase scenes in “Louis” took best advantage of that asset: when the pint-size Armstrong sprinted down an alleyway or peered around a corner, the music felt like an extension of his point of view. (Scott Steiner, the film’s music editor, deserves a special citation for making those transitions seem both crisp and natural.)
What drags “Louis” down is almost everything besides the music. Shot partly on location, it has a look of elegant decay but a palette like the Pottery Barn catalog; Vilmos Zsigmond, the esteemed cinematographer, seems conflicted at times by his assignment here, stuck between nostalgia and reinvention.
The plot, both too complicated and too inane for recapitulation, pits Armstrong — played winningly enough by Anthony Coleman — against corrupt and lecherous forces. Chief among them is Judge Leander Perry, portrayed by Jackie Earle Haley as a Chaplinesque dyspeptic, complete with Hitler mustache. The inevitable damsel in distress is Grace (Shanti Lowry), a brand-new mother and star attraction at Mahogany Hall, the Storyville bordello.
Mr. Pritzker couches some of this in the guise of genre convention, but he also has a weakness for empty diversion and blunt-force symbolism. Several of his bordello scenes, filled with writhing women and slow-panning camera shots, have a visual style more in line with a Bacardi commercial or an Akon video.
There’s a heavy-handed scene in which Grace glides through a cemetery in flowing white garments, cradling her baby. (She later figures in an even cornier dream sequence, set in the heavens.) At another point the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden, then an inmate at an insane asylum, goes by in the back of a cart; as he passes the young Armstrong, he actually hands him a crown. (This doesn’t bode well for “Bolden!,” a companion film of Mr. Pritzker’s now in postproduction.)
And while it’s a given that “Louis” would take liberties with the historical record — that’s what movies do, even the good ones — the figures included from Armstrong’s actual childhood seem thrown in in a way that feels contrived. So too do the inside jokes, which seek easy laughs at the expense of narrative immersion. One such gag involved the phrase “hanging chad,” followed by the sight of a Diebold vote-counting machine.
Then there was the matter of Professor Davis at the Colored Waif’s Home. In a sly bit of casting, he’s played by Mr. Marsalis’s younger brother Delfeayo Marsalis, whose sudden appearance on screen, at least for the jazz-literate audience at the Apollo, was the equivalent of a nudge to the ribs. A legitimately funny point was being made there, something about the naturally didactic and edifying urges of the Marsalis family. You can only wonder how Wynton Marsalis, an executive producer of “Louis,” weighs those urges against the thrust of the film.
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