Bird (1988)

In my continuing attempts to, I don't know, understand or appreciate jazz, the Charlie Parker (as played by Forrest Whitaker) biopic directed by Clint Eastwood. Probably futile on my part; I couldn't really discern anything wrong when Buster Franklin (Keith David) was playing nothing but B-flats in the scene where Charlie gets a glimpse of what rock n' roll is going to be like. And there were times I wondered if Charlie was playing off-key notes when he was clearly supposed to be killing it. Tone deaf, I guess.

The movie is set near the end of Charlie's life, starting with his attempted suicide by drinking iodine, with flashbacks to earlier parts of his career throughout. Eastwood doesn't spend much time on Parker's life prior to being a success. The opening shot is Parker as a child, blowing on a whistle as an older sibling tows him on a tricycle. A few shots of him practicing on the porch in the same neighborhood. His first encounter of Buster Franklin, where Charlie doesn't play too well and gets "gonged", and run off the stage.

But mostly it's the steady decline of Charlie Parker's career, set alongside his relationship with and his wife, Chan (Diane Verona.) Their meeting in clubs in New York, arguments, his health problems, his drug problems, the death of their daughter. Perhaps appropriately for a movie about a jazz musician, Chan and Charlie's relationship seems all about the things they don't say. Especially on Chan's end. Verona always seems like she's on the verge of saying something, but never does. And I don't mean something angry or hurtful necessarily. When he leaves the house in the countryside where they're staying to head into town for a possible recording gig, Verona looks like it's on her lips to tell him to be careful, to come back, maybe to not leave at all, because she's afraid he won't come back. But she doesn't. She hugs him while trying not to cry, and he drives off into a very different landscape from what he remembers.

There's a conversation between Chan and a psychiatrist at Bellevue, where Charlie ends up after the iodine drinking incident, where Chan refuses the suggestion of shock therapy because of Charlie's gift. That she isn't willing to sacrifice the musician for a husband. I don't think it's money concerns, so much as the musician is part of what she loves about him. But, again, that isn't said outright.

(Chan Parker gets thanked at the end of the film, I guess for providing a lot of information or acting as consultant, but it does make me wonder how accurate some of this is. Not like Charlie Parker was alive to give his side of things.)

Eastwood keeps Whitaker's face in a circle of light most of the time. When he's on-stage playing, the great musician people want to hear and meet, and when he's at home, having another tense conversation. In contrast, Verona's face is often in shadows, especially during those conversations with Whitaker. Like her life's been eclipsed by his, and so she's trying to keep him together so her life doesn't disintegrate along with him.

Whitaker plays Parker as this guy who is talented and witty and confident, but also so certain he's doomed that it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He's shown a body in the morgue of a guy who used heroin and ultimately died, and told that'll be him, but sooner because he started even younger. And he always seems to come back to that mindset. That his sand is running out, so he tries to push now. Make the folks in California appreciate bebop, make the tour, make the recording, make it now. And when it feels like he's stymied, his frustration boils over and he sinks back into drugs, or alcohol if he's trying to stay off the drugs.

The scene where he learns his daughter died and he spends an entire night, just calling Western Union to send telegrams to Chan, then hanging up, dialing again and ordering another telegram. Even after he's gotten strung out, he keeps making calls, keeps ordering telegrams that are alternately formal, personal, desperate. The part where there's a lady he picked up at a party that evening apparently there watching this the whole time, to the point she's crying at the sight of this guy wrecking himself physically to match how wrecked he is emotionally, gave it an element of the surreal I'm not sure was intended.