The Buddy Holly Story/La Bamba – DVD

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY (1978)
***/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A
starring Gary Busey, Don Stroud, Charles Martin Smith, Conrad Janis
screenplay by Robert Gittler
directed by Steve Rash

LA BAMBA (1987)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Esai Morales, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rosana DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña
written and directed by Luis Valdez

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I don't know enough about music to pass judgment on the legacies of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Everybody knows they had their mutual rendezvous with destiny (and Don McLean) in a plane crash that helped end the first phase of rock-and-roll, but their legends are the distorted shotgun marriage of crazy fame and early death that makes totalling their actual achievements a tad difficult. Strangely, their movie biopics (now available on DVD in a two-pack) don't really try. The Buddy Holly Story is really an ode to people sitting in rooms playing music regardless of anyone's relative fame, while La Bamba is a family story hinged on the rise of a credit to his community. The real pleasures of these films are strangely incidental to hero worship, and passing judgment on them is a matter of aesthetics: where Buddy triumphs by attempting something modest and nailing it with a vengeance, La Bamba bites off more than it can chew and sails into the waters of respectable mediocrity.

Technically, The Buddy Holly Story hasn't much on its mind. It starts off in a Texas roller rink, where Holly (Gary Busey) and his minuscule backing band of upright bass and drums (handled by Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud) unleash "bop" on a family radio show. The scene boils down to Busey really enjoying himself, the crowd really enjoying itself, and you realizing that you're really enjoying yourself. It's no big thing, but that's the point: Holly's rise is a matter of people delighting in the deflationary comforts of something that's no big thing. As the early stages of the movie progress, there are no biopic signposts that Holly will be Rock Messiah and Fiery Sacrifice to the Gods of Music–he's just Buddy from Lubbock, Texas, exploring the possibilities of his music and having a good time playing it.

In defining the greatness of this smallness, the movie comprehends its subject well past what a quickie biography ought to. Though Robert Gittler's screenplay is loaded with odes to the hero's magnanimity (blowing off resistance to his Hispanic bride, maintaining his vision in the face of pressure), director Steve Rash downplays it all, cleverly using wide shots to resist punching up the drama and in turn miss the point of listening to records in your room and daydreaming. A scene where Buddy and the Crickets accidentally become the first white act to play the Apollo–a guaranteed orgy of condescension in the hands of anyone else–becomes one more excuse for Busey and company to invite a bunch of people to have a good time with them. Whatever hokey thing the script is up to, we bite the bullet and join the party anyway.

Much has been made of the music being played "live." The ploy isn't merely a stunt. When most music biopics ladle on perfectly-produced tracks that only bolster their heroes' godhead status, the unarticulated raw sound here is more like home, once again letting us participate instead of worship. And though the film goes through the motions of what a brilliant nice guy Buddy was, you brush off the homilies any time the movie fires up the music. Our own Walter Chaw has mentioned that The Buddy Holly Story isn't very accurate (due in no small part to the filmmakers losing life rights to the Crickets' story), but in a sense the movie isn't about Buddy Holly at all–it's about lounging around, working things out, letting the time pass, and savouring the moment. It could be any band, any singer, any time. In levelling the experience of enjoying music, it speaks more profoundly to music's liberating power than a sturm-und-drang horrorshow à la The Doors.

Of course, the former Ricardo Valenzuela comes with more baggage than Buddy Holly does. As the son of Mexican-American labourers, he's not simply a lucky teenager riding the charts, but someone looking for a better way of life and a bedrock for his family. So it comes to pass that La Bamba concerns the sticky situation caused by that rise out of the American nothing–not only for the Horatio Alger in question (Lou Diamond Phillips, looking nothing like Valens), but also for his alcoholic fuckup brother Bob (Esai Morales). Ritchie is the buckle-down nice guy who treats everybody with respect; Bob's the sexual terror and bad husband/father unable to get his act together. As Ritchie achieves fame, Bob's perceived failings are magnified and his sense of worth shrinks. But though this raises questions about the impact of spectacular fame, the movie never really deals with anything out of the ordinary.

Saying that Rash is a better director than Luis Valdez isn't going to help: La Bamba's thrust is a great deal more ambitious than that of The Buddy Holly Story. Yet although it tackles issues of ethnic pride, economic deprivation, and '50s racism (which the latter film either never bothers to parse–or bungles in execution), La Bamba doesn't say anything about such issues that isn't standard public chatter. We're of course expected to thrill to that nice boy's dreams coming true, experience his duality with "dark brother" Bob, and appreciate his annoyance (but annoyance at that) at having to de-ethnicize his name. Valdez has neither the psychological acuity nor the cinematic brio to truly evoke his characters' personalities or that of the society in which they live–and the film never takes off because of it.

Admittedly, La Bamba plays better than my fearful pay-TV sampling of its highlights as a smartass teenager. Between Ritchie's love and near separation from beloved, immortalized Donna (Danielle von Zernick) and the trials of Bob's even longer-suffering wife Rosie (Elizabeth Peña), there's incident galore. Alas, much of this exists as points on a narrative checklist–presumably, we all know what we're here for and the movie delivers with mechanical reliability. It doesn't have anything new to say regarding Valens's relationship with his music, his culture, or his family; mostly, it's a bunch of clichés designed to tell us what we already know. While The Buddy Holly Story had its share of chestnuts, its overarching approach wrote suggestive things in the margins, whereas in La Bamba, the margins are neat as a pin. That might be nice were the page itself not largely empty.

THE DVD
Somebody screwed the pooch at Sony. Both films come neatly packed in wafer-cases that slip into a keepcase-thick box, but, whether this is a packaging error or a mastering cock-up, an advertised 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer for The Buddy Holly Story never materializes. However good this fullscreen rendering looks (deeply-saturated '70s colours and a reasonable amount of fine detail admittedly help salvage the presentation), it still isn't OAR. If the Dolby 4.0 audio sounds disappointingly cramped given the rare "live" recording of the music, at least you won't experience serious discomfort. Extras include a lively commentary from Busey and Rash, with the former likening his current stint with Christian men's group The Promise Keepers to the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the pair of them experiencing near-total recall on who did what and why. It's a lot of fun and alone worth a purchase. Director and cast bios and the trailer for the supporting feature round out the platter.

La Bamba receives the promised widescreen (1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced) treatment, and the transfer manages robust colours without oversaturation or bleedthrough. That being said, fine detail's a little off and the '80s grain can get a tad intrusive. The Dolby Digital 5.1 remix is killer, though, mining terrific surround effects from the film's surprisingly rich foley work. (It probably goes without saying that the Los Lobos/Carlos Santana/Miles Goodman music throbs at you from all six speakers.) Two commentaries kick off the extras portion. The first, featuring Phillips, Morales, director Luis Valdez, and executive producer Stuart Benjamin, is an underwhelming affair–a timid, occasional-anecdote number full of bad jokes and a mention, apropos of nothing, that California has tripled in population. Commentary two, with producer Taylor Hackford and associate producer Daniel Valdez, is far more informative, leading back to when the two were nobodies fantasizing about doing this biopic and then when the pair found success in film and Chicano theatre, respectively. They bring the context and passion that's lacking in the group yakker, even if they're a tad too credulous of their earnest material.

"Remembering Ritchie" (21 mins.) is actually a trio of vintage featurettes that pay lip service to the Valens legacy while in fact selling the movie's "authenticity." Shots of the actual (and clearly moved) Valenzuela family share time with actor soundbites and observations of how great Brian Setzer's Eddie Cochrane is. The infotainment detours are infuriating, but the snippets of Valens's battle-weary mother will haunt your dreams. A clip-and-glowing-carousel-driven video for Los Lobos' "La Bamba" cover, another video for "Lonely Teardrops" that consists of Howard Huntsberry's Jackie Wilson impersonation from the movie, cast and crew bios, and La Bamba's trailer finish off the disc.

• The Buddy Holly Story
  114 minutes; PG; 1.33:1; English DD 4.0, English Dolby Surround, French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Sony
• La Bamba
  108 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Thai subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Sony