Everybody Digs Bill Evans review absorbing delve into the tumultuous world of the great jazz man

"It's a film about music. Particularly, about what remains when a musician cannot play and is left to consider the terrible sacrifices made, without conscious consent, to this all-consuming vocation that creates family pain and jealousy almost as a toxic byproduct. It's a drama to put you in mind of Glenn Gould and Hilary du Pre, sister of Jacqueline. Screenwriter Mark O'Halloran has adapted the 2013 novel Intermission by Owen Martell about renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans."

"It focuses on a period of emotional devastation for Evans, when no music was possible perhaps a restorative intermission, perhaps the start of a calamitous new aridity when his close friend and bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car crash in his 20s. The director is Grant Gee, who made the wonderful documentary Innocence of Memories about Orhan Pamuk."

"Anders Danielsen Lie plays Evans as a gaunt and distrait figure, his reticence intensified by grief; someone whose glasses are perched on a face almost too thin to support them, a smoker always apparently about to vanish into the gauze of cigarette smoke. He is a heroin addict, co-dependent with his girlfriend Ellaine Schultz (Valerie Kane); this is a habit that now has even more of a chance of destroying his life."

An elusive, ruminative movie unfolds scenes like unresolved chords, carrying viewers on a journey without a destination. The narrative centers on renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans during a period when he cannot play after bassist Scott LaFaro dies in a car crash. The film examines the terrible, often unconscious sacrifices demanded by an all-consuming musical vocation, including family pain, jealousy, addiction and grief. Grant Gee directs with Piers McGrail’s smoky high-contrast monochrome photography, punctuated by three garish-colour flashforwards showing later deaths linked to musical life. Anders Danielsen Lie portrays Evans as gaunt, distrait, a cigarette-smoking heroin addict co-dependent with his girlfriend.

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