American Symphony

 

Documentarian Matthew Heineman's Oscar-nominated film American Symphony generates warmth and a tinge of claustrophobia with its intimacy and closeness, but not at all negatively. 

Heineman's subject is multiple Grammy-winning musician and composer Jon Batiste, a native New Orleanian performer with a personality and smile as big and broad as the Mississippi River. His radiance is nearly shamanistic; he communicates in languages that are both mystical and grounded. It's wonderful to watch him at work as he navigates the many waterways and eddies of his very full and complicated life.

During the time of Heineman's filming, Batiste is working on an ambitious venture that would combine all of America's musical traditions into a single symphony, pulling from the traditions of African Americans, native peoples and other resident cultures and folkways. It's an enormous undertaking that Batiste seems called to produce but also unsure if he can make it happen.

At the same time, Batiste's wife, writer Souleika Jaouad, is battling leukemia, which has returned after years of remission. The tender exchanges between the couple, filmed in their most private places and at their most vulnerable times, gives the film a near voyeuristic quality, but doesn't cross the line into prurience or misery porn. Rather, these scenes rise to a spiritual level, and not just because of Batiste's very open devoutness. We can see and hear every breath, hope and despair, resignation and resolution. 

The combination of a truly unique human subject and phenomenal access to the ebbs and flows of the subject's life gives the film American Symphony itself a kind of classical structure -- many, many melodic passages followed by tension and counterpoint, the repeating of earlier themes and motives and a rousing closing section that fills the heart.