When you're lame

Director Tom DiCillo has fashioned a faithful portrait of the founding, foundering and implosion of famous American rock band The Doors, as well as the group's lasting legacy following front man Jim Morrison's death in 1971.

The band's keyboardist Ray Manzarek, among others, has vouchsafed the tale DiCillo tells, describing the depiction as an accurate counterpoint to Oliver Stone's allegedly misleading 1991 biopic. This is doubtless true, based as DiCillo's film is on archival footage of the band, firsthand accounts, news reports and Morrison's own film work. That Stone's film is more entertaining is also true, and here's where one must wear one's bias on one's sleeve, as I am among those who don't particularly care for Morrison's evidently pointless saturnalia and careless disregard for his fans, family and art. Like Morrison's musical output and stage persona, When You're Strange is a somewhat clunky, macabre, often muddled and incoherent celebration of excess, cruelty and self-destruction.

DiCillo's film opens with footage taken from HWY: An American Pastoral, a narrative-free film featuring Morrison lurching about menacingly and driving down a barren stretch of highway staring ahead like a madman, the camera pausing to admire, for instance, the gasping body of some small creature destined to become road kill. Such scenes are scattered about the documentary, adding, if nothing else, unwelcome exposure to Morrison's failures as an actor and film student.

Though generally plodding, formulaic and chronological, When You're Strange delves at times into triteness of astonishing proportions (shots of a flame being extinguished paired with reports of Morrison's demise spring immediately to mind). One montage sequence features images alluding to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, the carnage in Vietnam and the murders at Kent State, and finally the exploits of the Manson family, likening these catastrophes to the mood of the country and the turn in Morrison's art. It seems more likely that Morrison's increased drug and alcohol abuse was to blame for his black world view and eventual inability to successfully make it through a live show.

And what of the music? Contrary to meager assertions that there's no accounting for taste, the live footage of The Doors lends credence to the notion that the group was neither musically gifted to any extraordinary extent (no Joplin, for example, or Hendrix) nor particularly hard-working. Theirs is an instance of explosive celebrity. In short, it is a portrait of sudden fame and fortune and one man's inability to manage it. 

When not engaging in montage and symbolic imagery, DiCillio's examination of The Doors is by the numbers, proceeding from one done-to-death moment in rock history to the next. The film is narrated by Johnny Depp, who reads from a script so deadly dull that the actor was recruited after early screenings featuring DiCillo as the narrator bombed with audiences and critics. Even Depp's lilting tones and sincerity fail to render the banal observations of banal subject matter either engaging or entertaining. The film is nonetheless enlightening. If there remained any doubt about Morrison's recklessness and self-absorption, When You're Strange has dispelled them.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com