Maybe it’s a testament to Edgar Wrights’ skills as a filmmaker or to the documentary genre itself when operating at it’s best and most compelling, but after watching The Sparks Brothers, about the career of a weird musical duo I’d never heard of, I immediately wanted to learn as much more about them as I could. That’s perhaps the highest praise you could level at a documentary, and especially a music doc designed to give something of a complete impression of its artists of choice. The Sparks Brothers you leave it feeling like you know this band and know these brothers as people even if you’ve never heard of them before. And somehow the movie still leaves you wanting more.
I was drawn to this project because of Edgar Wright. Like many movie nerds I think he’s one of the best, or at the very least most interesting filmmakers working in the medium, and I was particularly curious as to how he would do a documentary. The Sparks Brothers is his first, initiated through him learning one of his favourite bands followed him on Twitter; and you can absolutely tell that this film is a labour of love between him and Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers from California who formed an eclectic rock act that from the 1970s on have been, as the saying goes, “your favourite band’s favourite band”.
Sparks never quite penetrated the mainstream (certainly not on this side of the Atlantic), but they’ve got a huge following among music nerds and musicians who’ve been influenced by them. That’s evident in the wide range of people Wright got to be talking heads for the doc: everybody from the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones to Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and John Taylor to Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert of New Order to Weird Al Yankovich. Also featured are a lot of non-musicians -comedians like Patton Oswalt, Scott Aukerman, Fred Armisen, TV host Jonathan Ross, actor Jason Schwartzman, TV producers Daniel and Amy Sherman-Palladino, and even author Neil Gaiman. And of course Wright himself gets in front of the camera a couple times. But among all these names, the most interesting people to hear from recounting the history of Sparks are the Mael brothers themselves, who are more than game for Wright’s stylistic antics. It shouldn’t be a surprise, they have much the same sense of humour.
Though he never deviates too much from the standard documentary structure, Wright does play around rather nicely with the format, introducing the brothers with a series of basic (to the point of absurd) FAQs, later spicing up the talking head sequences with gags -such as putting Russell behind a picture of Ron. Elsewhere, Wright incorporates his unique editing synced to the beat of songs as he did in Baby Driver, most notably when introducing those songs, which he pairs with a dictionary definition of one of their titles’ key words. This nicely fits with the films’ larger irony of feigning a seriousness in ambition, but frequently subverting that. The title itself is even named after a rejected name for the band back in its’ early days that Russell criticizes in the doc. Additionally, Wright incorporates animation, both in a crude hand-drawn style, and in a more sophisticated stop-motion look (particularly for the latter end of the story) done by the same animators who made Sparks’ music video for “Edith Piaf (Said It Better Than Me)”. I also really like what Wright did with the descriptors for the talking heads, occasionally inserting gags in there such as shoving off screen the bandname “Bates Motel” and replacing it with “Sparks” when bassist Leslie Bohem mentions how his former band dissolved into Sparks; or cutting from Alex Kapranos, with Franz Ferdinand under his name, to Beck, with the under-the-name descriptor being simply “See Above”.
These choices really fill out the character of the film rather than distract from the story of Sparks, which in fact seems very appropriate to them. This was a band after all known for their bizarre sense of humour -having once wrote a song titled “Music That You Can Dance To” after a critique they received from a producer. But while many of their songs covered funny topics (a lot of their love songs were about social awkwardness or failing to get the girl) more serious and soulful stuff would still slip in. And much like their discography, their career has been quite unpredictable, and has shifted between comic and tragic. The film illustrates how these southern California brothers (they’re often believed to be British) formed their band, Halfnelson -soon changing the name to Sparks- and how after a couple albums in America failed to get much traction, they relocated to the U.K., where they recorded their breakthrough album Kimono My House with the hit single “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us”, appearing on Top of the Pops and gaining notoriety for their unique aesthetic. Russell was just as flamboyant a frontman as any other band of the era, but during this time, Ron sported a Chaplin-style toothbrush moustache and took to deadpan staring into the camera at filmed performances -making Sparks famous as the band “with Hitler on the keyboard”.
A good chunk of the film follows a pattern of their career as they bounce back and forth between the U.K. and the U.S., always chasing success back home but never finding it outside of the local scene in California and an ever-growing cult following around the world. They have peaks and valleys to their careers, and to their credit their unafraid to discuss their failures and low-points. Yet the film heavily emphasizes their artistic integrity. They play what they want how they want and don’t care all that much if its popular -and they always seem to come back from their failures and reinvent themselves in new and unusual ways. As such they defy categorization, being at one point glam rock, at another synth, and later still baroque pop. In reality though, they’re just Sparks. And they’ve been quite revolutionary too: their synth track “The Number One Song in Heaven” coming ahead of that technique gaining popularity in the 80s. Through it all, they avoided the pitfalls of so many other bands as the brothers never fell victim to their successes, never were destroyed by drugs, and most importantly have maintained a very healthy relationship. Wright illustrates this facet beautifully in his attention to their process, his playful atmosphere that they’re able to be genuine in, and it makes them honestly inspiring in a way no other band is. Even now as elder statesmen, they continue to grow and experiment with their music -and release songs that are much better than most from artists in their fifth decade.
And 2021 may prove to be the year of Sparks. There’s a mini-arc that runs through the doc of Sparks trying to be involved with a movie -the Mael brothers being arthouse cinephiles. In the 70s they began developing a project with Jacques Tati, but he passed away before it could come to fruition, and in the early 90s they left their recording career for about six years to work on a film for Tim Burton that ultimately fell apart as well. But at last in 2021, they have achieved their goal, having written and composed all the songs for the upcoming musical Annette, directed by Leos Carax -a fact I had been unaware of in my anticipation for that movie and was overjoyed to discover!
Sparks’ story is a richly compelling one, and Wright’s telling of it is likewise richly compelling, almost as stylish and weird and fun as the band themselves. It’s been some time since I’ve felt this strongly about a documentary, but The Sparks Brothers really is a must-see. Wright brings his fullest passion and enthusiasm to this story of a band like no other, a pair of brothers who are as wonderfully endearing as they are talented; and as someone just exposed to them myself it has me agreeing with all of the talking heads: the world should know about Sparks!
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/
Comments
Post a Comment