NPR's buzzkill review of Ron HOWARD's "Pavarotti"
I was jazzed to see it when HOWARD was on The View last week, then googled since I hadn't known it was coming and this NPR deal fairly much busted my bubble. It's fine to document a subject's warts, which NPR does and gripes that the film didn't - I didn't know PAVAROTTI couldn't read music; *did* know he indulged his dog side - but the main theme of the review is that he "squandered" his gift during his last couple of decades.
Uh, NPR says he had a couple or three good decades, so what if he had died in his best days and therefore had left a wholly splendid image as his only image like the ones who died early? If he was "a clown" in his last years, uh, I say he (or anybody) earned it.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2019/06/07/730363989/pavarotti-documentary-misses-all-the-right-notes
.... Certainly, there's enough material for an arresting documentary, but Howard's film doesn't take advantage of it. It lacks any dramatic arc, and fails to make us feel much for its subject, whose eventual artistic decline – which the viewer never sees – felt both sad and somehow inevitable. It also does little to bolster the magical, complicated art called opera. ....
Pavarotti could have been a compelling story. (It was made by the same filmmaking team that produced the fine 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week.) It could have chronicled the most beautiful voice of a generation and how its charismatic owner ultimately turned his back on his art – and how wealth, ego and laziness played a role. Howard talked to many of the right people, but he likely didn't ask the right questions. Anne Midgette, the Washington Post classical music critic, is the only one who has perspective on the career. She explains that in the 1990s, around the time of the Three Tenors phenomenon, Pavarotti tends to lose his way artistically, "and the opera world was kind of left cold."
Did Pavarotti end up squandering his gift? Read a book like The King & I, the tough talking tell-all autobiography co-written by Midgette and the tenor's longtime manager Herbert Breslin (who also appears in the film), and you'll agree that he did. Alternately, Pavarotti's fans will point out that he had a good long run, debuting in 1961 and still singing in the early 2000s with the voice in remarkably good shape. It would have been appealing, though, for Howard to offer a few conflicting viewpoints. Instead, we must endure a smug Bono, who demonstrates how little he knows about operatic singing when he apologizes for "every crack" in Pavarotti's voice. ....
One less savory secret involves simply reducing the time he actually sang by blowing off rehearsals and cancelling appearances. After a while, several opera houses, including London's storied Covent Garden, considered Pavarotti persona non grata. Ardis Krainik, head of Chicago Lyric Opera, washed her hands of him after one point when she realized he had cancelled 26 out of his last 41 scheduled appearances. ....
In the end, what good was all the money? It's arguable that it diverted the great tenor's attention far away from his art. But Howard's film never considers these types interesting, inherently dramatic, conflicts. Instead, there's a reverential focus on Pavarotti's philanthropy, with people like Decca executive Dickon Stainer (also credited as one of the film's executive producers) saying things like "Goodness resonated out of him," or Bono, emoting, "He was crushed by injustice." ....
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