Luke: Everybody Digs Bill Evans is “a fascinating, beautiful and impressive feat of filmmaking”

Smoke fills the frame and dances along the beam of the spotlight lighting up the stage at the Village Vanguard.  

There’s applause as the Bill Evans Trio start into a performance of “Jade Visions”. The tempo is slow but deliberate and driving. 

Evans (Anders Danielsen Lie) and the Trio’s bass player, Scott LaFaro (Will Sach), share glances that become stares as the interplay between them intensifies. 

The camera cuts with the movement and posture of the musicians as they play and spar and feed off of one another. 

It cuts in time with the music, rapidly enough that the sequence builds to a mesmerising collage of recording equipment, fingers and hands on fretboards and keys, brushing and tapping at drums. 

The neck of LaFaro’s bass cross-fades to images of dimly illuminated road markings. A tape recorder’s spinning reel blends into the wheels of an out-of-control car. The last note from LaFaro’s bass rings out with a dubbed-in crash. 

Ten days after the recording session recreated in this sequence, LaFaro would meet an untimely end.

There is a bubbling apocalyptic intensity to this scene – opening with throat clearing and those lightest of Evans’ caresses on the piano keys, and ending with screeching tyres, crushed metal and death – that is maintained throughout director Grant Gee’s feature debut, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. 

Intermission

In the aftermath of LaFaro’s crash, Evans hid away from the world. There were doubts over his future as a musician. From the jazz world, those closest to him and Evans himself. In the words of the real Bill Evans:

“When you have evolved a concept of playing which depends on the specific personalities of outstanding players, how do you start again when they are gone?”

Gee and screenwriter Mark O’Halloran based Everybody Digs Bill Evans on Owen Martell’s novel Intermission, which explores the musician’s torment in this particularly dark period in his celebrated career. 

Gee initially conceived it as a stream-of-consciousness non-narrative film stylistically closer to his documentary work. That opening sequence with its swirling imagery and montaging gives a small taste of what that film might have looked like. 

Much of the film is more conventional in staging and execution. But fluctuations in tone and style signal that doom is never far away. 

Film strips burn and explode into colour sequences as the film takes us through other tragedies in Evans’ life. It’s a narrative that orbits death, and is anchored in a gnawing sense of finality.

The non-Evans pieces featured on the score by Roger Goula hit with the same intensity as that car crash bass note. The score intrudes on the action with force. It’s moody, out-of-time with the period setting. Like an electronic dirge. 

Leaving town

At a loss in New York and with his girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane) taking time away from the city to kick her heroin habit, Bill goes to stay with his brother Harry and his wife Pat (Barry Ward and Katie McGrath). 

At Harry Jr’s home, and later when he visits his parents Harry Sr. and Mary (Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf) in Florida, we see Evans in a childlike state. 

Harry Jr. and Pat worry for Bill, and treat him extremely delicately. There’s not much difference between how the couple interact with Bill and how they treat his niece, their daughter Debby. 

In these scenes Evans is put on the same level as Debby. Shots match their eye lines, and he becomes a playmate for her in some amusing sequences where she bounces and rough-houses in his unmoving presence.

Lie’s performance as Evans is one of delicate subtraction. It’s absorbing in its lack of showiness. The film treats Evans as a sort of blank space. He is so tormented by LaFaro’s death, and worn out from going off heroin cold turkey, that much of the performance is in thousand-yard stares. 

The spectre of that opening number is never too far away, the slightest noise or gesture calls us and Evans back to that world ending car crash bass note from the beginning of the picture.

Gee shows us the ripple effects and recurrences of trauma throughout Evans life and career. 

Death punctuates the film and leaks into the frame. Turning the black and white photography to colour, splashing up out-of-place digital video effects. LaFaro’s death caused a rupture in Evans’ career but it also disrupts and pushes the film’s narrative out of sync.

Great man

Everybody Digs Bill Evans is effective in shrinking the great man biopic down to a much smaller scale. 

We don’t see much of Evans playing the piano. Lie is an accomplished musician, but isn’t asked to pantomime his way through performances much. 

Instead, the performance pulls us in and is absorbing in the way it forces us to look elsewhere for evidence of Evans’ reputation. There’s a slightly comic tone to the frequency at which side characters recognise Evans and call him “great”, “brilliant”, “famous”. 

Ira Gitler’s liner notes for the Trio’s 1961 album Sunday at the Village Vanguard say: “‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ was used as one of his album titles and the phrase became a literalism.” 

And this plays out in the film. Pullman as Harry Sr reads from these liner notes in a tone that perfectly captures that proud but confused tone that parents have when they don’t quite understand a child’s achievement.

Metcalf and Pullman – as Evans’ parents – really give Gee’s film shape. Pullman’s glasses are lit up bright white to obscure his eyes, the same as his son, and in these moments there is a view of a possible future self. 

Harry Sr is a man who speaks of regrets, and in rehearsed narratives. Someone who has the luxury of revising his own history, and now owns up to mistakes when it’s too late to correct them. Mary is honest to a fault with Bill, she says things and shows favouritism in a way that mothers aren’t supposed to. 

But her children are grown-up, and one of them is famous, and even as he lies in his childhood bedroom shaking and sweating out heroin Mary looks on like he has a common cold. Knowing the truth of things but not caring, and loving no matter what. 

Viewers seeking a beat-by-beat summation of Bill Evans’ career will be disappointed by Gee’s film. This is a sketch. A suggestion of something. Drama and fiction fill in the blanks of a difficult and dark time in Evans’ life. Just as Martell did in his novel. 

Everybody Digs Bill Evans avoids the usual biopic traps. It cannot show us a great man at work. It doesn’t really capture the man at all – some things are impossible to convey. Gee’s sketch is filled in by what’s in the edges of the film: the supporting cast, the stories that intertwine and fade in and out of time, space and colour. 

What’s here is a dissatisfying biopic but a fascinating, beautiful and impressive feat of filmmaking.