[Dixielandjazz] "Let's Get Lost"

[Steve Barbone]

Chet Baker . . . those of us who grew up with his music, and/or met him,
will never forget it.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

A Jazzman So Cool You Want Him Frozen at His Peak

NY TIMES - By TERRENCE RAFFERTY - June 3, 2007

AT the very end of Bruce Weber¹s seductive, unsettling ³Let¹s Get Lost,² the
movie¹s subject, the semi-legendary cool-jazz trumpeter and singer Chet
Baker, looks back on the shooting of the film and says, in a quavery, almost
tearful voice, ³It was a dream.² Although in the preceding two hours Mr.
Baker has delivered a fair number of dubiously reliable utterances, you¹re
inclined to believe him on this one because that¹s what the movie feels like
to the viewer too. It¹s nominally a documentary (Oscar-nominated in that
category in 1989), but it documents something that only faintly resembles
waking reality. And Mr. Baker, who wanders through ³Let¹s Get Lost² with the
eerie deliberateness of a somnambulist, appears to be a man who knows a
thing or two about dreams.

Film Forum, which gave the movie its New York premiere 18 years ago, is
reviving it for a three-week run (beginning Friday) in a restored
35-millimeter print, and Mr. Weber¹s black-and-white hipster fantasia is as
beautiful, and as nutty, as ever. Now, as in 1989, the filmmaker seems bent
on stopping time in its tracks, preserving the illusion that nothing
important has changed since the early 1950s, when Mr. Baker was a handsome
young man with a sweet-toned horn, the great white hope of West Coast jazz.

He doesn¹t look the same of course; actually he looks like hell. When ³Let¹s
Get Lost² was shot, Mr. Baker was in his late 50s, and after 30-plus years
of dedicated substance abuse (he wasn¹t picky about the substance, though
heroin was generally his first choice) his face is ravaged, cadaverous ‹
groovy in entirely the wrong way. He often appears to be having some
difficulty remaining awake, even while he¹s performing, whispering standards
like ³My Funny Valentine² at tempos so languid that the songs kind of swirl
and hover in the air like cigarette smoke until they finally just drift
away.

The really peculiar thing about ³Let¹s Get Lost² is that its subject¹s
physical decrepitude and narcoleptic performance style seem not to bother
Mr. Weber at all. This isn¹t one of those documentaries that poignantly
contrast the beauty and energy of youth with the sad debilities of age. Far
from it. The picture cuts almost randomly between archival clips and 1987
footage to create a sort of perverse continuum, a frantic insistence that
the essence of Chetness is unvarying, eternal. And you can¹t always see much
difference between the young Mr. Baker and the old. Even in his prime his
cool was so extreme that he often looked oddly spectral, like someone
trapped in a block of ice.

Chet Baker¹s brand of frosty hipness was, in the ¹50s, considered a sexy
alternative to that era¹s prevailing ethos of earnest, striving
respectability (at least until rock ¹n¹ roll, which was more fun, came
along). Maybe you had to have grown up in that nervous decade, as Mr. Weber
did, to find Mr. Baker¹s ostentatious laid-backness subversive, to imbue it
with so much bad-boy allure. Mr. Weber, who is also a fashion photographer,
is a glamorizer both by trade and by nature, and when something imprints
itself as strongly on his fantasy life as the image of the young Chet Baker
clearly did, he holds onto it tightly ‹ cherishes it, embellishes it, uses
it to transport himself back to his own hard-dreaming youth. ³Let¹s Get
Lost² is his ³Remembrance of Things Past,² with this strung-out trumpeter as
his madeleine.

And what Mr. Weber winds up doing in this original, deeply eccentric movie
is giving Mr. Baker a luxurious fantasy world to live in, a holiday condo of
the imagination, where age and time are utterly irrelevant. The filmmaker
supplies his weary but grateful subject with a ready-made entourage of
shockingly good-looking young people (Chris Isaak and Lisa Marie among them)
who, in shifting combinations, drink with him, ride in snazzy convertibles
with him, giggle with him on a bumper-car ride and gaze on him reverently
while he croons a breathy tune in the recording studio. Mr. Weber takes him
to the Cannes Film Festival, where paparazzi surround him and he sings
³Almost Blue² for celebrities at a glittery party. No wonder Mr. Baker gets
misty-eyed at the end of the movie. The dream he¹s been dreaming, courtesy
of his devoted director, is the sweetest one a performer could ask for in
his declining years: the dream that he still matters.

Chet Baker hadn¹t mattered for a while when Mr. Weber was filming him. The
movie¹s release rekindled a bit of interest in his music, partly because he
was dead by the time it came out: In 1988, at the age of 58, he was found on
the street in Amsterdam, having apparently fallen from the window of his
hotel. He¹s practically forgotten now.

Jazz history hasn¹t been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin.
Unlike his rival Miles Davis, he persisted, with a stubbornness that
suggests a fairly serious failure of imagination, in playing the cool style
long past the point at which it had begun to sound mannered and even a
little silly. When you hear Mr. Baker¹s stuff, you can¹t help picturing his
ideal listener as one of those lupine swingers of the Playboy era, decked
out in a velvet smoking jacket and loading smooth platters onto the hi-fi to
get a hot chick in the mood for love. The ¹50s die before your eyes in
³Let¹s Get Lost.² It feels like the last stand of something that may not
have been worth fighting for in the first place.

In a funny way, the movie gives the lie to the nostalgic illusions it seems
to want to embody, just because the construction of this fragile, faded
jazzman as the epitome of cool is so elaborate and so obviously effortful.
It¹s killing work to be this cool. When Mr. Weber starts interviewing people
who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close ‹ his
bitter wife, a few girlfriends, three of his neglected kids ‹ you see how
tough it¹s been: how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how
much hollowing out of whatever self may once have inhabited the pale frame
of Chet Baker.

The enduring fascination of ³Let¹s Get Lost,² the reason it remains powerful
even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it¹s among the few
movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions
involved in the creation of pop culture ‹ and with the ambiguous process by
which performers generate desire. Mr. Baker isn¹t so much the subject of
this picture as its pretext: He¹s the front man for Mr. Weber¹s meditations
on image making and its discontents.

If you want the true story of Chet Baker, you¹d do better to look up James
Gavin¹s superb, harrowing 2002 biography, ³Deep in a Dream: The Long Night
of Chet Baker,² where you can also find, in the words of a pianist named Hal
Galper, perhaps the most perceptive review of Mr. Weber¹s slippery movie. ³I
though it was great,² Mr. Galper says, ³because it was so jive. Everybody¹s
lying, including Chet. You couldn¹t have wanted a more honest reflection of
him.² That¹s ³Let¹s Get Lost,² to the life: the greatest jive movie, or
maybe the jivest great movie, ever made.