Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (Eric Appel, 2022)
This isn't just the greatest movie of the year, but the greatest biopic I've ever seen. It's a comically fake music-biopic with the heaviest leanings on the poetic inspirations of hack parody, an ultra-high frequency channel sewn together from pop cultural memory, refusing to acknowledge it has stumbled on to an internal logic that may just understand Yankovic better than he understands himself.
Spencer, this is not. That would be a terrible name for this, I don’t think anyone in the movie is named that. Appel elides any merits in biographical objectivity to dive headfirst into a narrative, aesthetic, and psychological whirlwind of unhinged doofustry. I cannot stress enough that, above all else, this is the most determined, messy and pure exercise aimed at engaging with a person's subjectivity. Whether or not it's all Truth hardly matters. The perceptions are real because the experience is felt, and all of that matters with supremacy in this isolated vacuum of Radcliffe’s exhibition of Alfred Yankovic's lonely existence.
It would be wrong to declare this a one-note mission to portray a ruthless nightmare of powerlessness, oppression, abuse, and neglect, because those are four notes, which everyone knows would be a chord, not a mission. For all of the intentionally overstated bits, there are far more intentionally overstated bits. But there are also far more elliptical demonstrations of the elusive grasp Yankovic has on himself, as much as his surroundings, including the parental and romantic intimacy he craves the most. The range is vast, covering higher concepts like the illusion (digital, here) of the bond between psychedelic drugs and creative inspiration to other higher concepts like cocaine. It’s as if someone was on higher concepts while conceiving and also perhaps executing the film.
Fantasies of the mind function like movies within the film, reflexively clashing with violent abolishments of dreams. Reality is evaded and magnetized, at times paraded through the laziest, common steps passed off as fevered ideas. Dreams become nightmares, traumas are temporarily sublimated into dreams, self-constructed delusions are seen as only wholly tragic or saving graces -for simplifying them too much into hardened binary categorization assists us in resisting succinct diagnoses of Alfred and, in turn, call attention to the film’s attempt to frustrate its desire to cloak its parodic mastermind under parody). Instead, Appel implements surreal tactics that sever Yankovic from himself and us from a grounded sense of comprehension, and in that we share the same need he does, feel the same broad discomfort, and empathize on the only fair terms- on the only common ground we can authentically foster. The movie wants us to ridicule everything, especially movies that ridicule everything. That is why it is so, so long, so that it has more of itself to ridicule.
The film is sociologically cute but psychologically hapless, reflecting Alfred's own clouded hold on his intangible identity, which mimics the typical dimensions we're fed in biopics or character-driven narrative films, making room for the depths of the corporeal and the spiritual without a firm grip on either domain. Mechanically separated chicken, pork, corn syrup, water, contains less than two percent of salt, ground mustard seed, sodium phosphates, potassium chloride, sodium propionate, sodium diacetate, beef, sodium benzoate, flavor, sodium ascorbate, sodium nitrite, hydrolyzed beef stock, autolyzed yeast, dextrose, extractives of paprika, sodium lactate, potassium lactate, celery seed extract.
Yes, we're made quite aware that Alfred Yankovic is playing a 'role' as “Weird Al” Yankovic in his own life, alienated based on the dissonance between a desire to hide himself through mockery and the inevitable ways mockery reveals us. But what Appel has to say about our fragile relationship to our identity as moderated by a frenzied, oppressive –and depressingly palpable, physical, and masculine – higher power is profound in how abstract he allows the text to be while still keeping it as text, as close to our face as he can reach through the laptop screen.
The many (including my gurgling, morphine-ridden hospital room compatriot) who are ignoring the superiority of this project saw a completely different movie than I did, probably because they have been watching completely different movies than I have. Like
Citizen Kane or
Fire Walk with Me. In general, I find the uniform accusations against this film symptomatic of tired arguments like, “What is a Roku, is that that digital pet from Japan?” and “Didn’t Yankovic
already do this?” and “Didn’t Appel also
already do this, only in a way that will steal less time from my life?”
None of this would be nearly as effective if Radcliffe didn't give one of the best performances I've seen in... ever. It's a fearless performance, a courageous part to take, and if there's any justice he got to keep every Hawaiian shirt he fully inhabited. Julianne Nicholson (
Blonde) and Toby Huss (
Blonde) are also standout players as Alfie's supportive mother and his intimidating father in the film's ruthless first act. It's one of the darkest sides of mental illness I've seen portrayed on a would-be streaming network, stirring us more caustically in mere minutes than most horror movie villains do across a feature length, though they do reappear throughout the feature, and let me tell you a little bit goes a long way! Maybe all the way to Oscar™. And I hope they get recognition for escaping into the roles as bravely as they do here. Nicholson bravely dons a fat suit, a far braver feat than Brendan Fraser or Brendan Gleeson though I have a feeling she’s bravely bound to be overshadowed come awards season by one or more people named Brendan. I can understand why Netflix is burying this, why they wouldn't waste their money on a campaign. It's not on Netflix, after all. But awards don’t matter (even if Yankovic contributes a song over the credits whose lyrics declare its own Oscar eligibility) when you’re making Truth, and that Truth pauses to buffer occasionally so you can admire just how Truthful the movie has been being up until that point, while also giving you extra moments to admire how parody should be held as one of the sincerest forms of flattery. Or vice versa. (HT
1,
2.)