Chet Baker

For some unknown reason, the E Street Theatre was showing Let's Get Lost this weekend, Bruce Weber's 1988 documentary on Chet Baker. The film was a major source of inspiration and point of reference for James Gavin's biography of Baker that both J. and I read last year. Nowadays, however, it's pretty much impossible to see, so we had to take advantage of the opportunity.

It was all right. The book, I thought, made Baker sound like an inhuman monster. The film did not redeem him for me, but it did for J. She thought he seemed more vulnerable when she actually heard him talk. For me, he was perhaps a bit more coherent than I expected him to be (at the end, Weber discloses that Baker was in treatment at the time of their interviews), but otherwise, not any more appealing.

Interviews with three of his five wives (well, he never married one of them officially) formed the backbone of the film. The entire time I was reading the book, I marveled at what in the world would make someone like Baker, the consummate jerk that he was, attractive to so many women in such a powerful fashion, and I hoped that the movie would elucidate that. Not only did it not make this any clearer, but in fact made it even more incomprehensible -- all three, especially Diane Vavra and Ruth Young, seemed so normal. I did find Young's account of Baker trying to make a comeback in the seventies, playing the dingiest New York clubs for a pittance, touching.

Baker's third wife Carol and their three children, all living together in Oklahoma at the time the film was made, also made less of an impact than I thought they might. In the book, Gavin paints all four as conniving monsters, but on film they came across as average, if not particularly charitable to their celebrity father. Maybe I've been desensitized by overblown Hollywood villains to the point that the subtlety or real-life ones is lost on me.

The rest of the footage was visual frosting. Weber tried to create a mood, and I suppose it worked for the most part, especially since meaty footage from anything other than the last few years of Baker's life is virtually non-existent. We see Baker being driven around L.A. in a vintage Eldorado, surrounded in the back seat by two younger women whose identities are never made clear. We see Baker walking along the beach. More tellingly, we see Baker in the studio, trying to record a take, completely ignoring the producer, and everyone else indulging him. We see members of Baker's last band, a bunch of young Italian guys, who seem to worship him to the point of being ready to lick the soles of his shoes, and aren't the brightest tools in the shed when away from their instruments. In retrospect, I suppose, the impressionistic footage does help to create the sense that Baker, though still walking, talking, and sort of playing, has already left this world in all meaningful ways and entered one of his own, one that would claim his life a few months after Weber finished shooting.

For some strange reason, the audience at the Friday night show was completely obnoxious. People kept leaving and coming back throughout the first half of the film, rustling bags of popcorn, and one guy in the row behind us fell asleep and started snoring so loudly that I had to poke him in the shoe (twice!) and, once he finally woke up, tell him that he was snoring. I haven't seen behavior this bad even in a commercial theatre, much less in a place that supposedly attracts viewers that appreciate film as art rather than entertainment and therefore could be expected to be a bit more respectful.