About.com Rating



Just a Shining Artifact of the Past

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man has been called, by Wim Wenders, “one of the greatest music films of all time.” But, given his boys-club of Bono, Bruce Davey, and Mel Gibson were all intimately involved in its making, you shouldn’t take Wenders’ jaundiced word for it. I’m Your Man is, at best, a mild, disposable distraction; at worst, an incredibly poorly-made motion-picture.

If you'd even deign to think of it as cinema.

Lian Luson's supposed insightful portrait into one of popular music's most specific lyricists is no more than a trumped-up concert DVD, and not a very good one, at that. Its 100 minutes cut back and forth between interview snippets with the erudite old man of song, and footage from a grand-scale tribute-show, Came So Far For Beauty, staged in honor of Cohen at the Sydney Opera House in 2005.

With a cast of musical celebrities (Antony, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton) singing versions of Cohen standards in front of a hideously-slick collection of session-musicians, it's basically a tawdry variety show, if not some overblown karaoke night. A notion Rufus Wainwright furthers by openly reading the lyrics to "Everybody Knows" (which, y'know, everybody knows) off a teleprompter at his feet.

Far Away, So Far!

The footage of this performance is actually —almost inconceivably— far, far worse than what you’d see on some regular, cheap-and-nasty, contractual-obligation liveshow DVD.

I'm not sure what Wenders —the man who made The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire et al— sees in Lunson's directorial work. For what's on screen, to me, is a concert shot with such amateurish camerawork that it rather resembles a proud parent’s home-video footage of Little Tommy’s school play.

Lunson —whose prior work was, I do not jest, assembling the compact-disc Songs Inspired By Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ— has absolutely no idea how to shoot a musical performance. A musical saw is often heard, but never seen. The camera continually misses vocal and instrumental cues, panning across, in slow reaction, to verses or riffs already begun. And, worst of all, Lunson makes the editorial decision of leaving in that most tiresome bit of any stadia-sized concert: where the ‘talent’ feels the need to introduce each and every session-musician to the audience, patiently waiting for the polite applause owed to every individual on stage.

Peculiarly, Lunson seems to have had no access to the stage at all. Stuck so-many rows back, her single-perspective live-footage is as inert as any youtube’d clip captured on a mobile-phone. If it were just shown as snippet, to propel along the documentary's narrative, you could forgive it. But Lunson bases her entire 'portrait' around this terrible footage: Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man half taken up by karaoke.

Death By Talking Heads

The other half is interview subjects. Unfortunately, this means the inevitable: Bono. An omnipresent fixture in these on-screen exercises in rock hagiography, once again we must witness Mr. Vox drone on and on in his hyperbolic bluster, seemingly recycling the same things he said about Charles Bukowski in the Born Into This documentary.

Every second Bono's on screen is time that Cohen isn't. When actually shown, the subject proves himself to be an interesting one: trotting out lots of carefully-sculpted epithets and practiced deadpan one-liners. Cohen’s clearly the star of the show, but Lunson never really knows what to do with him. Her pitiful attempts at visual ‘lyricism’ are certainly not on par with Cohen’s lyrics, giving the film the feeling of failing to match its subject’s stature.