DN:FLIM Pavarotti
Ron Howard’s PAVAROTTI hits the predicatable notes in its portrayal of the late opera and pop-culture legend. Relying on extensive archival interviews, photographs and performance clips of Pavarotti, and both current and vintage interviews with the singer's family, colleagues, and confidants, Howard tells the story with his characteristic no-nonsense approach. Here’s the young Pavarotti, exuberant with outsize charisma, as he makes his professional debut, unhindered by an inability to read music. Here’s the world-renowned artist pulling off feats of unparalleled musical prowess. Here’s the warm and gregarious Pavarotti showing up on talk shows, cooking up a spicy pasta. Here he is, giving a master class to aspiring vocalists, with particular attention paid to one. Here he is, the doting but frequently absent father and husband, that absence underscored by the attention paid to that aspiring singer, who predictably becomes an assistant and then more. It all plays out as expected, this man of apparent great appetite and great insecurity delighting in the feast in front of him and essentially uninterested in ever declining an opportunity. Howard tracks how Pavarotti went from being a revered classical star to an international super-celebrity, the price he (again, delightedly, seemingly) paid being the abandonment of his opera bona fides. As his star rose higher and higher, he ended up palling around with pop superstars, befriending Lady Diana, pestering Bono’s housekeeper to force U2 into collaborating with him; and did world-smashing shows with the Three Tenors. His womanizing eventually caught up with him, undermining his beloved Italian Catholic family man status, but by this point that disapproved behavior is on par with all the other transgressions resulting from his unrestrained attack on the buffet of life.
Howard does an efficient job lining up all the pieces, but it’s telling—to me, anyway—that some film outlets have pivoted and turned over coverage of this documentary to writers who usually cover fancier, smarter stuff, not ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, offers his take; classical music editor Zachary Woolfe provides coverage for The New York Times. Which is to say, you have to know this stuff to follow Howard's presentation. That's disappointing in the doc space. Here, to comprehend what Howard's assembly, you need someone like Kennicot to tell you that a “recording of Pavarotti’s stage debut (as Rodolfo in Puccini’s “La Bohème”) reveals a voice with all the top notes we recognize but little of the breath control and legato that made his singing feel effortless and inexhaustible” and that Pavarotti emerged with “rock-ribbed mastery of his magnificent instrument.” Indeed.
Look, this is one of the highest-profile docs of the year to aim directly for the movie houses. It’s watchable and you’ll come away the wiser if you went in unknowing, and reminded of a fantastic star at a particular time in the pop culture firmament if you started off familiar. Who else but this man managed to bridge the gap between opera’s early 20th-century popularity and its late 20th-century simultaneous relegation to cultural footnote and transformation to cash-register bonanza? Who else better occupied the poles of pop culture, bringing together the perceived highs and lows in service of a giant, fawning public? Among the greatest charms of this recollection is that it provides the opportunity to witness this particular moment in popular culture suspended in amber, frozen, captured.