Cinema: More Than One Note at a Time BIRD Directed

Charlie Parker could not resist temptation. Bad ones (drugs, alcohol, women who were not his wife) and good ones (the improvisation no one had ever dared, around the chord progressions few had ever heard) were all the same to him, something he had to try. Bird, the movie based on the great sax man’s short, messy, indispensable life as one of the founding innovators of modern jazz, knows better. It surrenders to the right things, his compositions and performances, reconstructed with compelling authenticity by music supervisor Lennie Niehaus. And it repels the wrong things, the damp pity and even damper piety that usually attend movie explorations of “genius.” This film hates easy explanations almost as much as it loves the hard complexity of Bird’s song.

In the typical movie biography, the protagonist struggles against the world’s indifference and malevolence to make himself heard. In the process he acquires those spiritual wounds that justify his bad behavior and lend his inevitable tragic end an instructive note: treat talent kindly; it may be in touch with the infinite.

Bird will have none of that. In Forest Whitaker’s performance (which is softly gliding in manner, ultimately wrenching in effect), Parker is an innocent, but he is not the victim of anyone but himself. His is the innocence not of the artist saint, self-consciously trying to soar beyond conventional morality, but that of the child egoist, unconsciously trapped in a premorality where appetite — including the one for music — is destiny, and escape to adulthood is not an option.

Or, as it happens, a pressing need. Director Clint Eastwood’s vision of the jazz scene of the 1950s is touched, appropriately, by the austere romanticism of ’50s existentialism. It is a circle of sheltering darkness, where the time is always ’round midnight, the mood is always accepting (it’s not why you play but how you play that counts), and even agents and club owners are basically benign. Trouble is always an intruder from outside — a narc obsessed with pinning bad raps on musicians, society ladies slumming, rock ‘n’ roll making rude noises on the periphery — attacking the soul when it is restlessly idling between gigs. Bird, for all his troubles, is a wonderfully attractive figure, delighting in the lilt of big words and fine phrases, turning the memory of the moment he found his style into a throwaway comic anecdote. When he steals a saxophone from a rival who has gone over to rock, he tootles a few notes on it and says contemptuously, “I wanted to see if it could play more than one note at a time.”

But the real distinction in Joel Oliansky’s script, as in Eastwood’s direction, lies mostly in its refusals. Focusing on the last three months of Parker’s life, starting with a suicide attempt and ending with his sweet- smiling death as he watched a TV variety show, it flashes forward and back within this period, as well as through times past, jaggedly riffing the contradictory themes of amiable self-destruction in life and fierce self- transcendence in art, making no attempt to resolve the mystery or the irony of their presence in the same human composition.

By fragmenting conventional narrative smoothness, the filmmakers also fragment any possibility of a smooth descent to a conventionally sentimental conclusion. As Chan Parker, Diane Venora is no orchestra wife. She is stern, protective, forgiving and touched by an awareness, never openly acknowledged, of how short Bird’s passage is bound to be. Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie, for whom Conscience might have been a better nickname, and Michael Zelniker as Red Rodney, the white trumpeter who shyly insinuates himself into a black man’s world, make splendid sidemen to this life.

There is not a cheap note or a careless image, not an easy judgment or a forced emotion, in the 2 hr. 43 min. of Bird. It permits a man’s life its complexity. It invites us to experience the redeeming grace of his music. And with its passionate craft, it proclaims that Eastwood is a major American director.