Cinema: Whole Lotta Irony Goin’ On

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

Directed by Jim McBride; Screenplay by Jack Baran and Jim McBride

“If I’m going to hell, I’m going there playing the piano.”

— Jerry Lee Lewis

At the time Great Balls of Fire alleges the demon rocker made that remark, plenty of people argued that for him the trip represented no more than a return to his roots, a visit with the home folks.

Strange, though, are the ways of fate and fame. The movie shows Lewis’ bravado being directed at his cousin, revivalist Jimmy Swaggart, who is portrayed at more or less regular intervals denouncing rock ‘n’ roll as the “devil’s music” and praying for the redemption of Jerry Lee’s blighted soul. But the real-life Swaggart has since been brought low by the revelation of particularly tacky sexual practices. Lewis’ music, manner and morality now seem almost innocent in comparison with what has followed him up the charts and into the hearts of adolescents during the past three decades. Even the act that shattered his career — marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin Myra (the script is based on her as-told-to memoir) — is something we now feel compelled to “understand,” if not endorse.

The people who worked on this movie are not without a certain sophistication. They know that the heroic, tragic and farcical modes, all of which they briefly lurch toward in the course of the film, are not really appropriate to their story. They are also aware of how rapidly the world has spun since their protagonist was burning pianos and churning up teenage hormones. Accelerated change of that sort produces the kind of broad fundamental irony that moviemakers who take themselves seriously always love. How dumb we were. And so recently. How easy it is to encourage the audience to join in a superior snicker at simpler times, simpler souls.

The trouble is that rude realism keeps raising its voice, breaking in on the fun. The sound track naturally resounds with the orgasmic hammering of the Lewis beat, wails with the simple, not to say crude, sexual metaphors of his lyrics. Dennis Quaid very successfully re-creates his dervish-like stage presence (he made Elvis’ pelvis look as if it were stuck in the mud) in a portrayal that goes over the top in nicely calculated measure. And Winona Ryder contributes a hypnotically enigmatic performance — articulate innocence and inarticulate knowingness all mixed up — as the singer’s nymphet bride. All these authenticities fitfully but forcefully remind us that back in the enervated ’50s, there were certain unspeakably raunchy things in life and fantasy that Jerry Lee Lewis put us in touch with while Johnny Mathis and Jerry Vale were otherwise engaged.

Fundamentalist opinion to the contrary, Lewis was not Satan’s satrap. Anxious middle-class parents, who saw him as an emissary from a netherworld that was nearer at hand — trailer-park America — were possibly a little closer to the truth. Like Presley, Dean and Brando, he was a figure partially shaped by a popular culture that in the ’50s was learning to cater almost exclusively to kids and their need for rebel figures. But there was also an element of discomfiting truth in the message he sent. The thing about the young Jerry Lee was that he was all fecklessness and recklessness, without a shrewd thought in his head — and without a Colonel Parker to cover up his skid marks. There is a certain irony in that, but it is of an altogether more subtle and interesting kind than anything Great Balls of Fire has to offer.