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my original ALMOST FAMOUS/Cameron Crowe essay, for the sake of posterity. Little did i know that ALMOST FAMOUS would be his last good film...
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EATING CROWE
A Review of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS an his career to date
By [Vic Sage]
February, 2001
Oscar nominations came out recently and guess who didn’t get a best picture nod? Only the best picture of the year, ALMOST FAMOUS, written and directed by Cameron Crowe, who was similarly un-nominated for his direction. “So what?” you may ask. The history of the Academy provides a veritable “Who’s Who” of overlooked talent. Nothing new there. It does provide an excuse, however, to re-examine one of the most neglected great movies, and great moviemakers, of recent years.
If you look closely, you can see the arc of Cameron Crowe’s films as they mirror his own journey from precocious adolescent (FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, SAY ANYTHING, SINGLES) to successful professional (JERRY MAGUIRE), with music always marking the trail he has taken. Now a successful 40-something, Crowe does what we all do at that stage. He looks backwards, with longing. And so, in ALMOST FAMOUS, he offers us a loving reflection on his youth and the music that lit the way. With this picture, Crowe does the impossible… he makes us nostalgic for the 70s. Somehow, thanks to Crowe, the era has taken on that burnished glow that only memory can endow. For this he should be damned and praised.
Crowe starts his film with credits... not an unusual technique. Except these credits are being written in pencil on a yellow note pad by a disembodied hand. The hand writes out each name, even misspelling “Frances McDormand” then erasing the error and fixing it. The credits have not even finished and I already love this movie. This in not some generic, Hollywood story, measured and sliced with a cookie-cutter called “market research.” This is a personal story being told by somebody. And a young somebody, to boot… inexperienced, but gamely writing as fast as he can, fixing his mistakes along the way. If the credits are this good, what will the movie be like, I wonder.
Crowe was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine in the 70s, before his FAST TIMES adventure. I didn’t read Rolling Stone then, other than the occasional Hunter S. Thompson article, because Rolling Stone stopped being cool because music stopped being cool (disco... yikes!). But Crowe was a teenager who wrote rock criticism for them, and it is that period of his life that provides the basis for the movie’s plot.
Cast as the young Crowe is Patrick Fugit, an unknown kid with a couple of episodes of TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL under his belt. He is Crowe as a decent, nerdy, talented boy (William), who is barely surviving his loving, overbearing mother. As the mom, [crossout]Francis[/crossout], um, Frances McDormand is simultaneously unnerving and endearing in her Oscar-nominated performance. William’s loving but irritating big sister (a typically odd Zooey Deschanel) clashes with mom, and sis takes off with her boyfriend to become a stewardess. But, in an effort to save him from mom’s influence, sis leaves behind her record collection. That pile of vinyl opens up a whole new universe for William. He is an “un-cool” high school kid, isolated and in pain, father-less, sister-less… but Rock n Roll becomes his world and his salvation.
William becomes a writer, precociously penning music criticism for local papers. He is befriended by the burned-out editor of Creem Magazine, Lester Bangs, brilliantly played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman has been a ubiquitous presence in films since BOOGIE NIGHTS and his dual/dueling Broadway performances in the recent revival of Sam Shepard’s TRUE WEST was an electrifying experience. Now he creates a curmudgeonly mentor for William, a sort of ghost of Christmas-yet-to-be, ranting that “Rock is dead” and providing other such heartening insights, while also giving him a willing ear and an encouraging word. Though based on an actual figure, Hoffman’s Les Bangs is an original film creation… a Rock prophet-guru-nerd who, seeing his end in sight as he slouches toward Bethlehem, can’t help but try to pass the torch.
William is offered the chance to cover a touring band on the rise (the group is a bit preciously named “Stillwater”) for Rolling Stone magazine by an unsuspecting editor that doesn’t know the kid is only 15. William joins the tour while his worried mother screams to anyone who’ll listen that “musicians have kidnapped my son!” She has only let him go because she knows how much he needs this adventure, yet she is deathly afraid of losing her last child. Upon boarding the tour bus (bearing a sign: “the ALMOST FAMOUS Tour”), young William/Cameron journeys like Dante into the inferno. He is doggedly pursued by worried messages from mom (“Don’t take drugs!”) and accompanied only by his yellow note pad, his long-distance calls to mentor Bangs, and the “Stillwater” family that teaches him about who he is and who he can become. Still waters run deep, indeed.
One of his Virgils is the band’s enigmatic guitarist, Russell, brought to vivid life in actor Billy Crudup’s breakthrough performance as the Rock n Roll hero with feet of clay. The other is the siren Penny Lane, the beautiful free spirit who, as a “band-aid”, acts as both muse and sex toy for Crudup. She is ephemeral and damaged, leading other girls into a romanticized life of self-delusion, living in devotion to the music but not the musicians they service (or so they claim). Of course, the Russell-Kate-William triangle is an eternal one, resulting in pain and growth for all concerned. Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane is a magical character, and it’s a star-making performance, worthy of her Oscar.
But the key, supporting player in Crowe’s tale is the music. There is a moment in the movie when everyone is on the bus, and it has been a long, bad night. Emotions are frayed. The mood is fragile. Elton John’s song “Tiny Dancer” is heard and, one at a time, everyone starts to sing along. Music heals. Families can injure, but they can heal, too. Like his earlier films, music is the heart and soul of this film, both in the dramatic moments and concert scenes, dramatizing the effect on both the players and the audience as together they create, for a moment, a surrogate family for all who need one.
It seems at first a small story to build a movie on. Nothing blows up. The sex is mostly off-screen. Like all of Crowe’s other pictures, ALMOST FAMOUS is a character study in the coming-of-age genre. But, when seen through the context of his career to date, you realize it’s about Crowe coming of age, as much as the characters in the film.
When you look back at his movies, first you find FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. Like ANIMAL HOUSE a few years earlier, FAST TIMES was a touchstone for a generation. Aside from talented young actors who got their starts in that film (Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, Anthony Edwards, Judge Reinhold and Eric Stoltz), it featured Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh (80s icons of teen lust), and Sean Penn’s star-making turn as the stoner-surfer dude, Spicoli. It was one of the first honest movies I’d ever seen about high school life.
Being raised on Godard, Andrew Sarris and the auteur theory, I initially credited first time director Amy Heckerling for the film’s wonders. Time has not borne out that gross conclusion, as her career has included JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY, EUROPEAN VACATION, LOOK WHO’S TALKING (One and TOO), and the aptly titled LOSER. Little attention was paid to the fact that someone actually wrote the movie (not only wrote it, but based it on his own book). A kid named Cameron Crowe (“was that his REAL name?”) went under cover in a Southern California high school, wrote a book about what he observed, then adapted it as a screenplay. The movie based on this piece of gonzo journalism/screenwriting still provides insight into both the period of the late 70s-early 80s in America and the eternal period of adolescence.
Then, Crowe went behind the camera to create a series of excellent movies as both writer and director. SAY ANYTHING, with Jon Cusack, is a tragi-comic tale of young love that has taken on a passionate cult following. When asked by the girl’s father what he wants to do for a living, with a nod to THE GRADUATE, Cusack says:
“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”
After FAST TIMES at High School, SAY ANYTHING said everything about that scary time right after graduation. Crowe’s next picture, SINGLES, talked about relationships amongst 20-somethings, during and after college, in the era of Seattle grunge garage bands. It’s a flawed movie, but he got one of the very few great Matt Dillon performances ever recorded on film, showing once again his great skill in directing actors. The use of music in FAST TIMES, SAY ANYTHING and SINGLES is integral to the characters, not just an excuse to release a soundtrack album. When Cusack stands outside his girl’s apartment in SAY ANYTHING, he holds a boom box over his head blasting Peter Gabriel while standing in the rain. Using music to communicate from his soul, Crowe creates one of the most moving, romantic moments from any movie in the last 20 years.
Writer-director-producer Crowe then created JERRY MAGUIRE, his first breakout-commercial Hollywood mega-hit. Despite that reputation, the movie is really about a young urban professional guy finding some personal commitment and professional redemption (or was that professional commitment and personal redemption? It works either way). It’s actually a small, personal film at heart. Except, you know, with Tom Cruise. And once again he launched starry careers, providing great showcases for Renee Zellweger and Cuba Gooding, Jr.
As a filmmaker, Crowe is unlike such contemporaries as writer-director Kevin Smith, who tells us true and interesting things about our popular subcultures, but in a cinematically clumsy way; or the Coen brothers, who say nothing but with a delightful visual style; or Spike Lee, who is wildly inconsistent and political, rather than personal. Crowe is a both a writer and a director, both literary and visual, and he makes movies about himself and about human relationships. Unlike film-school filmmakers, he doesn’t make films about films. He makes movies about life. And so, he tells stories about us. They are stories worth telling and he tells them wonderfully well.
Too bad those Oscar nominators missed that fact, as they rushed headlong over a cliff to recognize such stereotypical Hollywood fodder as TRAFFIC (wow, there’s a drug problem in America! Who knew?), ERIN BROCKOVICH (big screen episode of THE PRACTICE), GLADIATOR (beautiful, stupid and hollow), and CHOCOLAT (Miramax marketing overcomes a slight truffle of a film). HIDDEN DRAGON, of course, is a marvel, certainly worthy of consideration, but Crowe got only a screenplay nod and supporting actress nominations for McDormand and Hudson. And so, Crowe remains our stealth genius. ALMOST FAMOUS, indeed.
Like all of Crowe’s other films, ALMOST FAMOUS is a tale both personal and universal. It made me reconsider the era I grew up in, and the person I was then and am today… goddamn it. That’s the power of a great storyteller and, make no mistake, Crowe is perhaps the foremost auteur of his generation. But it looks like it may be up to future generations to realize it.
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