Sundance 2015: Nina Simone Doc Opens Fest With a Roar
It’s become a recent-ish tradition for the Sundance Film Festival to kick off their opening night with not one but two selections: one narrative feature and one documentary. Given that Park City’s annual gathering of independent filmmakers, hard-to-please tastemakers and curious, altitude-sick out-of-towners has been a key player in turning nonfiction movies into a mainstream phenomenon — the list of significant docs this fest has launched is miles long — the eventual doubling down was no surprise. As Robert Redford mentioned in his unusually brief opening remarks at last night’s first public screening at the Eccles Theater, he’s always wanted to erase the notion that documentaries aren’t “movies,” and giving the form a gala platform is yet another way of putting his money where his still remarkably photogenic mouth is. (Even odder than Redford’s brevity: The festival’s founder walked right past the podium and started addressing the crowd from the center of a dark stage, without a microphone. It took Festival Director John Cooper to get him back into the spotlight. Everything okay, Bob?)
Music docs in particular have done well for Sundance’s first-night premieres, with several choices — Searching for Sugar Man and Twenty Feet From Stardom — starting things out on literal and figurative high notes. (Last year’s opening narrative film, Whiplash, also got the fest moving with a primo musical bang; as for its 2015 counterpart, the gymnastics raunchcom The Bronze, let us never speak of it again.) Liz Garbus’ What Happened, Miss Simone?, a portrait of singer/activist/force of nature Nina Simone, may not be on the level of those award-winning movies, but damned if it doesn’t lay out the life story of “the high priestess of soul” in broad, clips-bountiful strokes. You may find fault with the film’s tendency to glide over certain aspects of her career and personal struggles. You will not leave the movie without being a bona fide Simone fan if you aren’t already.
Beginning with footage of the singer staring down an audience at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, What Happened goes about answering its question by flipping back to Simone’s childhood, detailing her early musical ambitions to be the first black female classical pianist. Despite her talent and the financial support of well-to-do patrons, she was rejected by the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; that “early jolt of racism,” as Simone referred to the incident, became the first of several events to fuel an inexhaustible supply of anger at society. A summer gig at an Atlantic City bar gave birth to the blues chanteuse she’d eventually become, with the film tracing her rise to hit recording artist, jazz sensation, long-suffering wife (her manager/husband Andrew Stroud does not come off well), a major player in the Civil Rights movement, industry pariah, American ex-pat, playing-for-chump-change café performer and, eventually, a rediscovered legend.