20,000 Days on Earth
Directors: Ian Forsyth, Jane Pollard
Cast: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue
Length: 97 min
Country: UK
Singer, songwriter, novelist, and screenwriter: Nick Cave is many things, but above all Nick Cave is a poet. The subject of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s
pseudo-documentary 20,000 Days on Earth is not a man at ease, despite his accomplishments. He is haunted by passion and violence, and he explains that his greatest fear is losing his memory. When pressed as to why this is, he responds: “Memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive are tied up in memory.” Nick Cave surmises that once we forget who and what we are, we have no reason to exist. The film takes the approach of a fictionalised documentary, following Cave on his 20,000th day on earth, visiting a psychologist, having lunch with fellow musical collaborator Warren Ellis, visiting an archive of Cave memorabilia, driving around his adopted home of Brighton with a number of cohorts (Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue, and former band member Blixa Bargeld) and watching (appropriately) Scarface with his sons. This is all inter-spliced with footage of recording sessions of his newest album, ‘Push the Sky Away’ (please check the Boar for a very positive review!). It culminates in an impressionist take on a man that is hard to pin down. Factually Cave fans will not learn anything new aside from odd trivia from Nick Cave’s past; but this is not a biopic. It perhaps can be more easily understood as a painting: this film is a portrait of Nick Cave, a summation of his history and looking forward to what is next.
We get a sense of a fractured and chaotic man. A man not completely at peace with himself
And what a painting it is. We get a sense of a fractured and chaotic man. A man not completely at peace with himself. This is obviously a life-long issue for Cave, and reflects in the film’s aesthetic choices: the film is loose, doesn’t follow a particular plot or narrative, but simply watches and observes the protagonist. And whilst Cave has always been a self-mythologizer, imbuing the film with this aspect through moody over-narration, it is when Cave forgets the cameras are there that the film truly reveals the man under the legend. It may be as simple as an alternate take, shown in full, of the appropriately epic ‘Higgs Boson Blues’; or it may be the extended scene in which Cave meets psychoanalyst Darien Leader, concluding the session when discussing the death of his father in his late teens. Pollard and Forsyth are intelligent enough to at once reveal Nick Cave for who he is, whilst also continuing the process of mythologization of perhaps Australia’s greatest cultural icon.
The film is no conclusion for Cave. And he understands this: we live, we work, we write, we love, we hate, and eventually we die. Cave finds no tragedy in this process. He realises that the movies are a fantasy and that reality is nowhere near as exciting. But in the day-to-day life stories emerge – and it is these stories that are important and spell-binding and earth-shattering and mind-breaking. If there is any message in this film, that would be it. And it is spectacularly envisioned in the finale to the film, a conclusion that is so spectacular and emotional that I couldn’t help but weep.
The last ten minutes really encapsulated the magic of Nick Cave and his work. It summed up the man that I’ve grown up with, his music echoing throughout my home all through my childhood and teenage years. A man who in many ways has mentored me through his music.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve never listened to Nick Cave, nor even if you’ve heard of him. Regardless of its surreal and wonderful subject, the film is a high achievement in documentary and surrealist film-making. I fear that it may be stuck in the rather obtuse category of music documentary for some time, due to the failure of a cultural recognition of Nick Cave on the level of someone like Bob Dylan. But in time it will emerge and be recognized for the landmark that it is.
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