True Stories

David Byrne's 1986 True Stories is a wonderful movie.  I use the adjective "wonderful" advisedly.  The film is not a "masterpiece" -- movies of this sort are far more intentional and ostentatious.  I also hesitate to call True Stories "great" -- a "great" film is one that, in additional to other pleasures, works through some important or complex theme.  True Stories doesn't have that character -- but it is "wonderful" in the sense of being filled with "wonders".  The picture has something of the quality of a work made by a precocious child -- it's naïve, emotionally direct, and strangely optimistic:  although made by the essential New Yorker, David Byrne, the peculiarly robotic front man of The Talking Heads (and populated by Soho types:  for instance, Spalding Gray and Stephen Tobolowsky), the film is conspicuously lacking in irony -- none of the odd events in the film is bracketed with scare quotes.  Byrne's approach to the material is uncomplicated and direct, an aspect of the film embodied in the spare symmetrical imagery, the direct full-frontal aspect of the photography, the bright lighting and garish colors:  Byrne seems to design the film in a childish way -- this is particularly apparent from some of the Criterion supplements that show Byrne's storyboards:  primitive unadorned cartoons.  In fact, the naive aspects of the movie -- Byrne's faux simple-minded narration and his use of slide-show montages and obviously stylized rear projection are initially disquieting:  the tone of open-eyed and non-judgmental wonder is a bit wearing at first.  You keep expecting the shoe of post-modern irony to drop.  But it doesn't and what is initially irritating slowly becomes charming. 

True Stories is a musical revue, inflected heavily by a pop art sensibility that gazes adoringly on big cars, Edward Hopper-like rural main-streets, shopping malls, and unadorned metal buildings.  The plot, a series of vignettes, involves an imaginary town celebrating the sesquitennial (150th) anniversary of Texas, by staging a sort of variety show -- the show is labeled "A celebration of Specialness."  Byrne's narrator (he is dressed in black with a black Stetson and drives a huge red convertible) shuttles between the various characters.  As with most movie musicals, True Stories ends with a series of songs and dances (and other talent show acts) that climaxes with the leading man belting out a song.  This was John Goodman's premiere movie and he is endearing throughout -- he's also a creditable singer.  (Goodman who is heavy-set, a little melancholy, and self-effacing is the polar opposite of leading men like Fred Astaire or  Dick Powell -- he's a big loveable lump without much discernible talent in the center of the film.)  The movie is populated by various eccentrics:  Spalding Gray plays a vivacious civic booster, the Mayor of Virgil, the imaginary town, who has not spoken directly to his wife for 32 years, and who is responsible for bringing a Texas Instruments-like high-tech firm (Veritech) to town.  Goodman is Lewis Fyne, a worker at Veritech, who is desperately looking for "matrimony" -- he advertises for a wife on billboards and TV.  Swoosie Kurtz plays a lady too lazy to get out of bed.  Roebuck "Pops" Staples is a voodoo priest who uses his magic to help Fyne meet a woman.  In less developed roles, there is a woman who loves things that are cute (in the original cut of the film, she dies of a heart attack during a parade featuring babies in strollers), a Latin lover, and a woman whose every word is a lie.  A Veritech executive talks about Steve Jobst with adoration and, in deleted scenes, is trying to contact space aliens.  He tells Byrne's narrator:  "The world is changing.  This is the center or one of many centers."  These characters are deployed across a totally horizontal, flat as a board, landscape in which new, desolate suburbs are being built.  At one point, the camera pans through an empty, newly built suburb, passing nice, but vacant-looking houses, as debris blows in the wind:  "Who's to say that this isn't beautiful?" the narrator asks rhetorically.  Slow pans across parking lots and the fronts of metal buildings and elaborate freeway access and exit ramps further display the horizontal landscape.  Sometimes, we see great vistas that are mostly sky with hunters in the foreground or lovers strolling toward the horizon.  The cube in which the talent show is performed glows from within, an enigmatic temple to some unknown god poised against the flat endless plains and the stormy sky.  The film is prescient about the role that technology will assume in our lives and, indeed, prophetic as well in its imagery of the cheerless, barren suburbs engulfing the land, but, nonetheless, vibrant with their own kind of bleak beauty.  At the climax, Goodman's character sings the Talking Heads' song "Someone to Love" with its odd, disquieting chorus:  "We don't want freedom, we don't want justice/We just want someone to love."  This mantra could be said to define many of Donald Trump's supporters today and, in fact, Byrne, who has now grown into his eccentricity and seems pretty much normal, acknowledges this fact in an oblique side-long way in one of the supplements on the DVD disc.  The elites want to control everything, including esthetics, but Byrne's point is that people are intrinsically creative and, everywhere you go,  there are indigenous forms of art that are beautiful and worthy of admiration in their own way:  Byrne's camera gazes with something like love at small-town marching bands, drum majorettes, baton-twirlers, a surreal fashion-show in which people appear wearing urban camouflage (suits with brick and wall patterns) or coats covered with growing grass.  It's like a State Fair -- everywhere you look, people are inventing new and wonderful things, making spectacular artifacts and, even, inventing bizarre, if beautiful, conspiracy theories.  (One of the film's best musical scenes is a full gospel choir performing the song "Puzzling  Evidence", a tune about the "trilateral commission" and the Kennedy assassination, among other things.)  In Byrne's vision, this is democracy with a little "d" -- everyone is a star in one way or another, and all these disparate people are working together for something like the common good.  "Be proud of what you are," is the film's slogan.  True Stories is casually utopian and weirdly blissed-out.  Byrne hasn't made any other films and this one seems like a happy accident -- it's hard to see what could follow this picture, but it's delightful from beginning to end.