Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Everybody Digs Bill Evans borrows its title from the jazz pianist’s acclaimed album, but director Grant Gee is not interested in telling a success story. Instead, he focuses on one of the most difficult periods of Evans’s life.

In June of 1961, the Bill Evans Trio are at the height of their creative collaboration, playing at New York jazz club the Village Vanguard. A few days after the concert, bassist Scott LaFaro is dead. The loss of his musical partner propels Evans (Anders Danielsen Lie) into a spiral of self-destruction – one that would later be described by his colleagues as the longest suicide in history.

The Irish-UK co-production may be riding the wave of music biopics, but its sensibility runs counter to the genre’s usual formulaic approach. Most surprisingly, the feature declines to centre itself on showy, award-chasing performances.

Gee, who rose to fame directing music videos and documentaries, opens with fragmentary images of the legendary concert. The shots are dripping with sensuality as the camera closes in on fingers digging into strings and keys, then releasing, on fluttering eyelashes, a display of utter non-verbal synchronicity. The exchange of a knowing glance, a small smile shared among the musicians. But this is where the exploration of their relationship starts and ends. There are no misty-hued flashbacks to align the viewer with Evans’s emotional turmoil. If anything, the opposite is the case: brief, violent glimpses into his future are the only scenes in colour.

In his period of mourning, the black-and-white cinematography cloaks Danielsen Lie’s face in shadows: a silhouette against the window, impossible to read. As he turns his head, it is the sunlight reflecting on his cheek that reveal traces of tears. Through his refusal to externalise Evans’s inner workings even as his pain is unmissable, the Norwegian actor delivers a performance of subtle intensity. Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman co-star as Bill’s parents, a variable that immediately changes the melody unfolding in this piece when they appear. The elderly couple may squabble and bicker but there is a deafening silence regarding the elephant in the room – a turn both tragic and humorous, giving the film an unexpected edge.

Defying many of today’s cinema trends, Everybody Digs Bill Evans doesn’t even pretend to offer a neatly packaged portrait of a complex human being. In its quiet acknowledgement of dissonance, it  moves through a full gamut of emotion, allowing unresolved chords to linger in the air, deepening rather than resolving the enigma of Bill Evans.