Paul Thomas Anderson‘s eye for vivifying music onscreen dates back to the late 1990s when, after “Boogie Nights,” he made Technicolor mini-masterpiece music videos with his ex-girlfriend Fiona Apple — or made a San Fernando Valley-sized shrine to Aimee Mann with his third feature, “Magnolia.” Since then, he’s kicked around with HAIM while turning one third of its Los Angelino triumvirate, Alana Haim, into a screen actress. He’s shot for Radiohead and made a regular collaboration with band member Jonny Greenwood to create some of the 21st century’s most memorable scores. Many young cinephiles now associate the mischievously lilty notes of “Phantom Thread” with the poison promise of new love and obsessive creation.
Last December, PTA teamed up with Geese frontman Cameron Winter to film, while operating his own Panavision camera, his solo stage performance at Carnegie Hall, running through sparse piano arrangements of tracks off his solo album, “Heavy Metal.” The result, a 72-minute film now being distributed roadshow-style by Janus Films before inevitably living on the Criterion Collection, is a stunning arrangement of its own: a deeply achey, sincere but never cloyingly earnest concert movie that’s tender to the point of frailty. (Benny Safdie counts as a co-producer, and the film’s scratchy New York quality and setting can’t help but have his imprint.)
The matted-hair, lithe Winter can seem a bit uncomfortable in his own skin in the public eye, as he did onstage ahead of “Cameron Winter at Carnegie” at its New York Film Festival world premiere at Alice Tully Hall. But on the piano, laser-beamed into his songcraft, he’s quietly electrified, at seemingly at peace as his tenorous vocal glissando and nimble fingerwork on the piano produce shiveringly tender folk ballads that echo Harry Nilsson and Van Morrison. (The usual comparisons to Tom Waits and Rufus Wainright are right, too, but Winter is his own strange thing.) If you weren’t previously sold on the wily Winter antic rock chaos of Geese — rapidly becoming one of the most popular contemporary art rock bands of these times — you’re about to. Paul Thomas Anderson has created a rhapsodic shrine to the man that is nonetheless ballad-sized in its emotional scale.
Winter, in December, played and sang to a sold-out crowd of more than 2,700 at the stately cultural temple that is Carnegie Hall, and this film can at times feel like a religious experience, an incantation, a lonely vigil. The singer/songwriter was 23 at the time of the performance, one year older than Bob Dylan when he headlined Carnegie Hall, and similarly at the precipice of major fame. Fixed on a mobile rig that will at times careen and whoosh across the stage when not otherwise holding on Winter, Anderson’s camera catches the expressionism and chiaroscuro of stage lights illuminating and fading off the singer’s face.
The result is hynoptic, a concert film up there with “Stop Making Sense” but for introverts. Songs like the popular single “$0” acquire an even more wrenchingly somber quality as a lovelorn protagonist rues being exploited by a relationship (“You’re making me feel like a dollar in your hand / You’re making me feel like I’m a zero dollar man”). Stripped of production, his indie hit “Love Takes Miles” plays even better. While many of the songs sort of hover in the same key and bleed into one another, that makes for an all the more transfixing experience. The lack of an interstitial anything save for a sweet prologue and moving coda make for experience also that’s immersive, deep, and the kind whose truth you can feel somewhere in your body even if you can’t quite articulate it.
Grade: A-
“Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall premiered at the New York Film Festival. Janus Films will release it in theaters starting November 20.
