One doesn't have anything to do with the other, but Martin Scorsese's hypnotic concert film/rock 'n' roll elegy The Last Waltz, while being no less uncritical of its subjects or their milieu, exposes the spuriousness of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous once and for all. A document of The Band's farewell performance at the San Francisco venue Winterland and the aftermath of that all-star evening, The Last Waltz was made during the peak of a tumultuous period for Scorsese, with time borrowed from his simultaneous production New York, New York.

A chronicle of the end of an era in music from an enthusiast's perspective, Scorsese's film is more behaviourally honest in this regard than Almost Famous, not just because it's a documentary (after all, the sight of a lens turns most people into amateur thespians, nay, hams), but because The Last Waltz doesn't treat women and drugs like totems. Rather, they're in the ether surrounding the music, and the music is what intervenes. In almost every anecdote told by members of The Band between sets, they are at music's mercy; when Robbie Robertson, the group's most popular face, remembers The Band's "depressing" infancy, during which he and the others, starving poor, developed a system for smuggling bologna out of the supermarket, he puts the "art" in "martyr."

It's no wonder that Scorsese, who was thisclose to becoming a priest before enrolling in film school, found his voice through this material--there are obvious divine implications in not only artistic devotion but also in The Band's often Catholic music itself, to say nothing of the ceremonial purpose of "The Last Waltz" concert, in which a number (more than twelve, you'll pardon) of rock's holiest disciples were invited to participate. (Even Neil Diamond joins The Band on stage, owing to Robertson's fondness for songwriters out of Tin Pan Alley.) But Scorsese's troubles with New York, New York ultimately account for the melancholy tone of The Last Waltz--he wallows in the finality of it all. The film's appeal winds up being ghoulish, even perverse, with its aspects of a wake for the men constituting The Band. Robertson insists that touring for more than sixteen years is pressing your luck, citing Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley as casualties of the road, but the end of The Band would seem to have the same impact as a plane crash or a drug overdose.

The entire film is told in past tense, not nostalgically, but elegiacally, with Robertson lamenting the toll the road took on him instead of celebrating his liberation from it. Scorsese calls The Last Waltz the only bright spot of his New York, New York days--you wouldn't know it save for the sporadic joy found in the songs (which stick in your head for days after, particularly "The Weight" (a.k.a. the "Take a load off Fanny" song)--ironically shot post-Winterland on the MGM lot along with "Evangeline" (featuring a so young as to be unrecognizable Emmylou Harris) and the title theme to fill in perceived structural gaps), or perhaps you would in that the film lacks the unrelenting pessimism of New York, New York. "Rompin'" Ronnie Hawkins' cameo, for one, proves the misery's antidote.

He's a delight in the second of the DVD's two commentary tracks as well. MGM's Special Edition DVD release of The Last Waltz falls on the 26^th anniversary of "The Last Waltz" and the film's 24^th anniversary, so there's a 25^th anniversary in there somewhere. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is fantastically clear, but I'm hesitant to praise the colours, as some of the more severe lighting designs leave skin tones curiously unaffected--the saturation may have been monkeyed with for fear of bleed. The Dolby Digital 5.1 remix of the original quadrophonic recording (the film's other audio option on this disc) is quite powerful; The Last Waltz begins with the credit "THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD," and I obeyed, impressed that the music never sounded harsh but disappointed that I had to enable the subtitles for the ridiculously quiet interview segments with The Band. (This discrepancy isn't as great in plain ol' Dolby Surround.)

Of this DVD's pair of commentaries, the lesser is actually the one to which Scorsese contributes. He and Robertson, recorded separately, focus on the germination of the project, the complexities of the shoot, everything that is covered more succinctly in the disc's featurette "Revisiting The Last Waltz" (22 mins.)--which is also superior for offering glimpses of veteran production designer Boris Leven's sketches, Scorsese's floor plan for the cameras, and the complex, 200-page shooting script, wherein each verse of each song was assigned a colour and an angle.

On the second track, "The Band and Others" (Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks; The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes author Greil Marcus; producer Jonathan Taplin; associate producer Steven Prince; New York, New York producer Irwin Winkler (who says, "To this day, I've never seen [The Last Waltz]"); Hawkins; and The Band's Levon Helm, John Simon, and Garth Hudson) alternate professional and personal observations; MGM even allows the listener to enable pop-up text identifying the various speakers. The mood of both yak-tracks is far more rose-tinted than that of The Last Waltz--profane though many of the recollections are, one wishes they had a little less revisionism to them.

An "archival" outtake (in stereo or weak 5.1) of a 12-minute instrumental jam with the evening's big talents (sans Muddy Waters), a four-part still gallery that shows Jake "Raging Bull" LaMotta attending the premiere of The Last Waltz, a TV spot and the theatrical trailer for The Last Waltz, and eight pages of liner notes written by Robbie Robertson and dedicated to the memory of deceased Band-mates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, round out the DVD, which comes packaged--for now--inside a shiny cardboard slipcover.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
117 minutes
MPAA
PG
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
MGM

the critic

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Published: May 9, 2002