One More Time With Feeling

Synopsis: A fly-on-the-wall doco that goes behind the scenes of the creation of Skeleton Tree, the new album from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. The making of the film took on a greater significance following the death of Cave’s son, Arthur, and provided a reflection on that tragic event and its influence on the album.  

Last year, Nick Cave’s son, Arthur, and his friend tried LSD. Hallucinating from the drug’s effect, Arthur walked from an old windmill not far from the family home in Brighton to the edge of a nearby cliff from which he fell to his death. The aftermath of that terrible event permeates almost every frame of this very raw and exposing documentary by filmmaker Andrew Dominik (Chopper, 2004, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007). This is a film that operates on three different levels. On the surface it’s a deliberate marketing tool designed to promote interest in the new album. It was promoted as a ‘one-night-only’ event to be screened on the eve of the album’s release. In fact, it has had a limited release season. Still, the idea garnered a bit of attention which no doubt helped the record sales.

Of more interest, though, is the glimpse it affords into the creative process of the enigmatic artist, his close friend and collaborator, Warren Ellis, the rest of the band and the invited artists. It’s a seemingly chaotic atmosphere where Cave’s elliptical genius (there are those who would call him that) is somehow corralled by Ellis’s calming and more focused influence. We saw something of this relationship in Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s excellent 2014 doco, 20,000 Days On Earth, but here, Dominik takes us even closer to the creative coalface. His wandering camera seems to be in almost permanent close up mode which has the effect of really placing us in the room. Ellis is a highly entertaining character and the banter between he and Cave is dry and acerbic. In one scene, Cave admires Ellis’ newly-acquired, shiny aluminium violin. “It cost me 3000 dollars,” says Ellis. “Does it sound good?” asks Cave. “No,” replies Ellis, “but it looks great.”  

But it’s the third level of the film that is the most powerful. “I don’t believe in narrative anymore,” says Cave near the start of the film and he speaks about how, since Arthur’s death, he sees everything coexisting in the same moment. The prehistoric man in his cave sits simultaneously with man walking on the moon. It’s the beginning of what will become an ongoing motif throughout; his efforts to deal with his grief, to understand and reconcile what has happened. We hear his pain through these monologues and through the lyrics of his songs. We also experience it through the silences in the scenes between he and his wife, Susie Bick, especially when she produces a painting by Arthur that she found after he died. It’s of the windmill where his final moments began.

Dominik shoots the film mostly in black and white and the starkness he finds creates a sad beauty. He also shoots in 3D (a process joked about by Cave throughout the film). I saw the 2D version and I can’t see what would be gained in the third dimension other than feeling even more like we’re in the room. Still, this is a very moving film and even if you don’t like Cave’s music (I do) there’s a lot for the non-fan to like. It’s maybe a bit too meandering and a touch too long and seems to struggle with how to end. For me, the first of three false endings is the most powerful, when Cave is joined by Danish soprano, Else Torp, for the album’s penultimate song, "Distant Sky". I’d have left things there, but the title track is the last on the album and the extra ten minutes it takes to fit that in diminishes what could have been a profound final sequence.

 

 

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