Paul Williams was one of the most active singer-songwriter-actor-personalities of the 1970s. He wrote or co-wrote some of the most romantic and well-loved songs of that era, from "The Rainbow Connection" and "Rainy Days and Mondays" to "We've Only Just Begun" and "An Old Fashioned Love Song." His high camp and thick sugar style probably peaked with his collaboration 1974 with Brian De Palma in Phantom of the Paradise, a film for which he wrote the music and starred in as a slightly sexier, more powerful version of himself.
But since the mid-1980s, Williams has been somewhat invisible and largely forgotten by the younger generation. He fought addictions to drugs and alcohol (natch) and has been touring on a much smaller basis for the past twenty years or so.
Stephen Kessler's film, Paul Williams -- Still Alive is a love song to the man who wrote so many love songs. That is, Kessler confesses early in the documentary that he was a weird, fat kid growing up in the '60s and '70s and that Williams' music spoke to him in a deep way. Now in the present day, as a self-concerned documentarian, Kessler goes out to connect with his idol and make a movie about how far he's fallen -- at least that's exactly what he tells us.
When the two meet, Williams seems a bit nervous and unsure about Kessler's motives. He hopes to tell his life story, beginning with his troubled relationship with his father in Nebraska as a kid... but Kessler doesn't let him do this, saying it will be boring. Already the two seem to approach this film project differently. We see them interact over the course of several months, growing closer as time moves along, as the filmmaker follows the singer on a tour of various smallish shows around the country (and into the Philippines). They build a friendship as they learn to accept one another for who they are. To Williams, Kessler is a nice guy who has an unrealistic, nostalgic idea stuck in his head; to Kessler, Williams is a fallen idol, who is making it in the music biz his own way.
The biggest problem with this film is Kessler himself. I appreciate that this film functions as a form of psychotherapy for him, coming to terms with his own childhood and his own failure (Stephen Kessler is not really a household name, after all), but I don't really care to watch a movie all about him and his feelings and his view of Paul Williams. On the other hand, Williams is a super charming performer who shows a deep and interesting insight into his life and career. I could watch him on state and onscreen for hours. He's funny and self-effacing, self-aware and unapologetic.
So many times, just as Williams is about to say or do something interesting, Kessler inserts himself (or his directoral/editing touch) to change the course of events. This is one of the most unnatural fly-on-the-wall documentaries I've ever seen. Kessler has no qualms about pushing and prodding Williams to get him to do what he wants. Thank god Williams mostly pushes back. Kessler is desperate for Williams to be a broken man, suffering in his fading glow of decades ago, but Williams, thankfully, won't have that. He's aware he's fallen a bit, but not unset about it (this seems to have something to do with his involvement in AA, or the like, although that's never totally investigated).
Williams only looks forward, and doesn't live in the past, the way Kessler does. This is the most interesting element of the film, although I'm not sure this isn't an example of a broken clock being right twice a day. Kessler seems to be totally unaware of the film he's making and the subject he's looking at and seems to trip into this interesting duality of "forward and backward". That he does hit it means this movie is not really a failure, but the way he gets there is really messy.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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