Blue Like Jazz Blu-ray Review
The flip side of Portlandia.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 31, 2012
There are a rather disturbingly high number of synchronicities between the film version of Donald Miller's
semi-autobiographical tome
Blue Like Jazz and myself. Like Miller, I grew up in an insular environment where
one
religion was incredibly dominant. In Miller's case, it was the Southern Baptists, in mine, Mormonism. Like Miller, I
"escaped" the confines of my upbringing by moving to the Pacific Northwest, and rather incredibly like Miller, I ended up
at Reed College, the tony private liberal arts school in Portland's inner east side that has been dubbed the "Harvard of
the West".
Unlike Miller, however, I had already completed my undergraduate work, and so was at Reed for my
Masters, where I was able to forge my own incredibly multidisciplinary program that saw me doing everything from
analyzing the poetry of William Butler Yeats with an internationally renowned Yeats scholar to studying Classical Greek
with an elderly and very formal British professor to working in the theater department and scoring a production of
William Inge's
Picnic. That last foray may point out another salient synchronicity shared by Miller and myself,
namely a love of jazz, a love that I personally have been fortunate to have blossom into a career. Portland's jazz
community is among the most creative and varied in the United States, with all
manner of world class musicians calling the city home, and I am proud and privileged to have performed and recorded
with several of them over the years. Finally, I also make part of my musical living by Music Directing for one of Portland's
large churches, and so
Blue Like Jazz's underpinning of a spiritual quest also hits rather close to home for me.
Obviously with so many connections preexisting between me and this property, I was primed to really enjoy what many
have called (at least in its book form) a proto-revolutionary look at what being a Christian in the modern world amounts
to. What I found, however, was a kind of anemic film experience that has a certain indie cachet (it was funded through
Kickstarter, for example), but which fundamentally misses the Portland "vibe" in a number of important ways, something
at least a little odd in that Miller himself not only of course wrote the source material but also contributed to the
screenplay of the film version.
"Contemporary Christianity" has become a branding device in everything from music to literature and film, to widely
variant
results. Church bound religion, as opposed to the more general practice of "spirituality", has had an especially hard
time
in the Pacific Northwest, whether or not its "contemporary" or "traditional", as fewer and fewer people identify
themselves
as belonging to any formalized religion, even if an equally
large number of people profess to believe in
something, even if that something can't be easily summed up in a phrase or even an all-knowing word like God.
That's one of the major errors this film version of
Blue Like Jazz makes about the Portland
ethos,
even in the rarified and often acerbically academic world of Reed College, because it's really more than likely that a
"recovering" Southern Baptist like Don (Marshall Allman) wouldn't be confronted by anyone about his beliefs, and
instead
would be greeted by a big, fat yawn and
laissez faire questions like, "Who cares?" Let me put it another way in
terms of my personal experience: I am a half-Jew, half-Christian guy who grew up in Salt Lake City surrounded by
Mormons and who was put in an Episcopalian parochial school for much of my early childhood in a valiant if ultimately
unsuccessful attempt by my parents to keep me from overweening LDS influence. And nine times out of ten when
I've relayed that history to my Portland friends, their reaction has basically been nonplussed, to say the least.
Though it probably won't strike many non-Oregonians as odd as it did me, but large swaths of this picture were not in
fact filmed at Reed or in Portland. While a couple of quick establishing shots (and later some other brief moments) do
capture the red bricked, ivy strewn ambience of the absolutely gorgeous Reed campus (see screencap #3 for a peek at the "real" Reed
College), most of the shots featuring the
blond bricked structures (including the huge, quasi-religious spire) were done in Nashville, Tennessee, literally and
figuratively a world away from the "hipster"
ethos that is part and parcel of Portland generally and Reed in
particular. One kind of funny sequence in the film, when Don builds a weird little bicycle and heads off into downtown,
does capture a couple of nice shots of Portland's rainy gray atmosphere, but otherwise this film really could have been
set anywhere, a decided detriment to such a location-centric piece.
The film does get a number of little elements right, like the "Scrounge Table" at Reed where kids leave their leftover
food and other students can forage for anything edible. And a passing comment late in the film when a native
Oregonian lambastes Don for using an umbrella in a rainstorm is absolutely spot on (umbrellas are seen as a sign of
weakness by sturdy Portlanders). And while there's one great scene that takes place in one of Portland's most iconic
marketplaces, the ineffable Powell's Books (one of the largest bookstores in the world and a testament to Portland's
literacy), the film has an oddly generic feel that never seems anchored in the very place that is supposedly causing all of
the cultural and spiritual awakening and/or questioning Don is supposedly experiencing.
Removing these perhaps picayune qualms (which admittedly are going to be more noticeable to Portlanders or
Oregonians like myself than they will be to the public at large),
Blue Like Jazz, while lacking a certain energy, at
least has the courage to explore spiritual questioning without ever devolving to screed levels. Some of the film is
undeniably heavy handed (Don's romance with Penny, played by Claire Holt, includes a couple of squirm worthy
moments in a church), there's a nicely understated aspect to other moments of the film as Don attempts to come to
terms with his own religious proclivities, ones that aren't necessarily tied to "organized religion" (making him therefore
the perfect Northwesterner in a way).
Co-writer and director Steve Taylor has his own long history in the Contemporary Christian Music movement, with
several Grammy and/or Dove nominations and subsequent work with the rock group Chagall Guevara to his credit. He
has a basic understanding of film craft and
Blue Like Jazz is basically decently constructed, but there's
something missing from this unlikely stew of spiritual questioning and Portland hipsterism. Watching the film, I
couldn't help but wonder what might have happened had the crew actually put down roots here in Portland for the
entire shoot, rather than just doing a few pick up shots and a couple of short sequences here. Maybe then the weird
and wacky vibe that is part of this often rain drenched city might have permeated the set and given
Blue Like
Jazz a little more credible specificity.
