I’ve never covered a rock opera before. I’ve never really listened to a rock opera either. But it’s an interesting form of music: a series of songs that convey a single narrative. As such it’s easier to adapt them to films if so chosen, as demonstrated by such divergent examples as Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Andrew Lord Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. But Tommy by The Who, I think especially deserves to be looked at, not only for being directed by one of Britain’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Ken Russell, but for its modern yet classically operatic story, its filmmaking, and how it translated the bands’ popular music to a new visual art form. Also I just really dig The Who’s music.
Tommy Walker (Roger Daltrey) is the son of a Second World War pilot who was believed to be killed in action. After a traumatic incident in his childhood brought on by his mother Nora (Ann-Margaret) and her lover Frank (Oliver Reed), he reverts to a semi-catatonic state rendering him deaf, dumb, and blind. Despite his guardians’ neglect and hopeless attempts to cure him, he is eventually discovered to be a pinball prodigy which gains him a massive amount of fame and followers, only for this influence of his to take an unexpected turn.
The story of Tommy feels a lot like that of a classical hero. From his lowly, troubled childhood to his discovery of his gift, becoming a beacon of hope and spiritual leader with its own tragedy tied to that in the end, it’s a story that, with a few details substituted, wouldn’t feel out of place among the great dramas of ancient Greece or Rome. It’s truly operatic in that sense, telling a grand journey fraught with both trauma and enlightenment, and the skewed reality this creates makes it easier to accept things like the unusual cause of Tommy’s condition (I’m not familiar enough with psychological trauma to know if blindness and deafness could result psychosomatically from PTSD). The film is also keenly aware of the silliness in its narrative and world, supplementing it with a vividly boisterous production design and some stylized cinematography. I haven’t seen much of Ken Russell’s work, but his style certainly fits in with the visual aesthetic of a lot of 70’s movies, especially in Britain –some of these sets wouldn’t look out of place in A Clockwork Orange. But they’re eye-catching, and good at keeping the world of the film at a distance. They also give the movie scope, setting various scenes on a colossal junkyard, a wind-swept beach, a mountain of pinball-themed paraphernalia, and finally a literal mountain that feels the most poetically grand. And Russell really takes advantage of the surreal implications of the album in sequences like the “Acid Queen” number, which is full of hallucinogenic wide-angle shots, syringes, an iron maiden, and dismemberment, making for one of the films’ most visually ambitious and enjoyable segments.
For what the role requires of him, Roger Daltrey is actually not bad as the titular Tommy. He has the spirit, energy, and passion for the role, not to mention the looks and physicality for the myriad of topless scenes the script for some reason requires of him. His renowned showmanship is on display here, not just in the way he performs his songs but in how much he commits. It’s not as easy as you may think to play this level of borderline comatose, and for not being an actor, Daltrey does so well. It’s all quite good, despite him being too old to play the character from the album as likely intended. The rest of The Who appear as well, though in much smaller roles. In addition to playing the band (possibly as themselves) on the stage during the “Pinball Wizard” scene, Pete Townshend provides vocals for a number of songs that aren’t incorporated into dialogue, and Keith Moon plays the uncomfortable Uncle Ernie (only John Entwistle sticks to simply the unnamed bassist part). Of course it’s the professional actors who give the best performances though, particularly the pair playing Tommy’s horrible, abusive, negligent parents. Oliver Reed, one of Russell’s most reliable stars, is a natural at the kind of jovial but unpredictable and possibly violent figure he plays here as Frank, and like in many of his movies, is very unlikeable. But it’s Ann-Margaret who steals the show. She delivers an incredible performance as the most interesting character in the film, and that’s including the deaf, dumb, and blind pinball champion. She’s a character in the mould of Queen Gertrud from Hamlet, and not just because after losing her husband she married a man she taught her son to call “Uncle”. Her relationship with Tommy is similarly complex, with her both loving and resenting him. She treats him terribly early on, but as illustrated through their song “See Me, Feel Me”, there’s a mutual desire to be close to each other despite their barriers (barriers she unintentionally created). Given the chemistry and closeness in age between the two singers (as well as Daltrey’s typical shirtlessness), there’s also an Oedipal undercurrent, particularly during this number, to their relationship and longing to understand one another. And an impassioned Ann-Margaret lets you feel all of it astoundingly through her nuanced emoting and delivery. Both her highlight and lowlight is her breakdown scene after watching her son beat the Pinball Wizard from her claustrophobic pearl white room (wearing a white dress too, I might add), that later fills with detergent, baked beans, and chocolate which she writhes around in. The ridiculous hyper-sexualized scene sent Ann-Margaret to the hospital with a laceration, yet she still gave it her all the next day of shooting. She was nominated for an Oscar, which she would have deserved to win, had she not been up against Louise Fletcher’s chilling Nurse Ratched.
The movie’s known for its musical cameo roles as well, from Paul Nicholas and Arthur Brown to Eric Clapton and even Jack Nicholson singing all his lines in a British accent -and it’s exactly as delightfully strange as that sounds. The best of these special appearances however are from Tina Turner as the eccentrically loud and provocative Acid Queen, and Elton John as the flamboyantly flustered Pinball Wizard. They lend themselves wonderfully to the music, and bring a lot to making those scenes the best in the movie.
The music of course is generally great, but the visual contextualizing and the way sequences are shot is really what makes the difference between a generic musical scene and one that truly stands out. “Pinball Wizard” is one of The Who’s best songs, but presented as it is here, with pulsating visuals, eclectic editing, and a vigourous tone, even without a member of the band actually singing it, the utmost sensation is expressed. It’s the filmmaking technique that would subsequently inform music videos, but few are as exhilarating as this sequence. Tommy wasn’t the first to tap into rhythmically coalescing fast-paced music to imagery, but it does do so incredibly well.
A rock opera has to tell an entire story through songs, which can make it difficult to translate to the visual medium of film. But in Tommy there aren’t any awkward lulls where there isn’t a piece of music, or even a sense of some development being rushed as it would be in a song. The Who, but particularly Pete Townshend, did an excellent job adapting the material to better fit a movie while keeping the flow intact throughout, from the serenity of “Prologue-1945” to the exultation of “Listening to You” –the two songs bookend the film, creating a cyclical theme to this fable.
The one area where both the music and story is tone deaf is in their dealing with part of the abuse Tommy suffers through when his parents try to drop him onto someone else. Though Cousin Kevin bullying him is relatively harmless, Uncle Ernie is another matter. It’s not just that Ernie molests him, or that Keith Moon looks particularly lecherous in the part, or Daltrey particularly helpless, it’s the fact that the song itself, tastelessly called “Fiddle About”, has the same light air to it as “Cousin Kevin”, a darkly comic whimsy that is very much inappropriate when it comes to sexual assault. It doesn’t help that the film additionally implies by way of a headline in a newspaper Ernie’s reading that this is characteristic of gay men. It’s a pretty appalling scene that’s not long enough to seriously bitter the movie, but it has to be acknowledged for the problem it is. Bear in mind, in Tommy’s original form, the protagonist is still a child when this happens, and I imagine it’s one of the core reasons the film moved his age shift up in the timeline.
If you’re a fan of The Who, it’s only a matter of time before you see Tommy if you haven’t already. For non-fans, if you can somehow get past the music permeating every minute of this film, you’ll find a good mythic-style hero story with plenty of creative visuals. Tommy didn’t change movie musicals in any monumental way nor did it make the band any more popular than they already were -though Daltrey did star in Russell’s next film Lisztomania, released later that year. But it remains a time capsule of 1970s filmmaking, music, and culture, and a rather distinct rock movie touchstone.
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment