U2's From The Sky Down: A Review
Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:16AM
It's fitting that the 36th annual Toronto International Film Festival opened with a documentary on U2, a band that's celebrating their 36th year together. As the first TIFF was getting underway, the group that would become U2 was having their first rehearsals in the drummer's parents' kitchen.
Few bands make it to their fourth decade. And as Bono says in From the Sky Down, the past can end up becoming a liability. U2 had long ago come to terms with the fact that they're well into middle age as individuals, as a musical entity and as a multinational corporation. As long as they can move forward, they feel okay back looking back.
From the Sky Down--the title is taken from a Joshua Tree-era sequence where Bono explains how songs are born--is director Davis Guggenheim's exploration of the a dark time in the late 80s and early 90s when U2 had lost their way. Their image became confused, their fans began to wonder and the songs had dried up. This is the story of how they stumbled through that tunnel to emerge bigger than ever.
At its heart, it's a study what it means to be in a band--a clan, as the film stress--and how four guys have managed to hold it together since the time they were teenagers.
The film is bookended by shots of the band preparing to go onstage at Glastonbury in June 2011. And while there's lots of extremely cool vintage pictures and archival footage (complete with plenty of bad hair, even on The Edge), the film captures the bands mediation on that make-or-break point in the U2's existence. Much of the discussion comes from a single day at the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg on May 28 as U2 rehearsals some Achtung Baby material for their Glastonbury appearance.
Some of my favourite sequences involve DAT playbacks of the earliest Achtung Baby sessions at Hansa Studios in Berlin. After weeks of discouraging dead ends, a jam evolves into a song called "Sick Puppy." As they work on that, we hear in real time--with Bono calling out the chord changes to fit whatever melody is coming into his head--"Sick Puppy" begins to resolve into "Mysterious Ways" over the course of just a few minutes. Later, an aborted bridge for that song becomes the basis of "One," watershed moment not only for the sessions and the album, but for the band itself. Watching that sequence--and hearing how these songs were born--is fascinating, even for non-U2 fans.
I like the way Davis Guggenheim handlers his subjects in his interview. It's obvious that U2 trusts him (thanks, probably, to The Edge's involvement in Guggenheim's brilliant This Might Get Loud from 2008)--yet they don't trust him completely. While the movie covers Edge's wrenchingly sad divorce, it almost completely glosses over Adam Clayton's dark period of alcoholism that nearly got him kicked out of the band.
Other fans might be annoyed at how U2 seems to dismiss The Joshua Tree version of the band as being too serious, to earnest, too black-and-white. Someone else I know knocked the film for editing. "The story arc wasn't fleshed out properly." And in retrospect, he has a point. This is a man who knows about such things.
Even so, I learned quite a bit about a band I thought I knew quite well. If you're a fan, you'll dig it. You'll be surprised at hearing U2 voice in their insecurities and fears. You'll see a very pissed-off Bono melt down after something went wrong on stage. The animated sequences are very clever.
And if you're not and you're forced to watch it, you'll at least come out with a new appreciation of what it takes to be U2.
Reader Comments (5)
Any release date on this Allen? {...nation-wide or hard copy]
I saw the film last night. I thought that it was terrible. No answers were revealed about this apparent near collapse of the band and its creative struggles. The film did not capture any interesting band dynamics or uncover any new insight into the band members' characters. In fact, there was little attention paid to the members of the band other than Bonao and Edge.
I suspect that Bono hijacked the making of this film because the diologue was dominated by Bono's boring introspective narration. We know the guy can talk about himself. It is too bad that the film did not let others share their observations of the band and whatever it was they were doing. Admittedly, I am not a big U2 fan, but I am a huge music fan and I was disappointed.
Kyle, the movie will, at the very least, be included in the super deluxe reissue of Achtung Baby in November:http://www.superdeluxeedition.com/news/u2-actung-baby-super-deluxe-edition-and-uber-deluxe-edition-coming-soon/
Surely a DVD release will follow once all the die-hards part with with their cash for the box set.
Kid Ket, knowing how low-key Adam Clayton is and how little time Larry Mullen Jr has for non-musical diversions, I'm guessing each was quite happy to let Bono be to this film what Robbie Robertson was to the Last Waltz.
Adam's alcoholism didn't come to a head until a couple years later, specifically when he missed the first of two shows in Sydney during the 1993 portion of the ZooTV tour. I'm not aware that his drinking problems/drug use were an issue during the AB sessions, which probably accounts for its exclusion.
agreed, andy & MLM -- larry and adam weren't even at TIFF for this, which is not a knock against them, it just reinforces how they like to turn off when they're not recording or touring. they're not as involved in the public persona of U2 as bono and the edge are. it isn't surprising to me at all they took a bit of a backseat in the film.
i've seen it twice now, on thursday and friday nights. i agree with a lot of alan's review, but even though i am a lifelong fan, i'm not an apologist, and i agree with what he said about the man who said it wasn't particularly well edited. i felt the build up was good -- i got a real sense of WHY the band was so fractured and on the edge of collapse -- but i didn't get a very good sense of HOW they resolved it. just because of "one"? really? that doesn't seem ... right. there were no real answers given for how they powered through the issues they were having. recording was kind of limping along in germany, they broke for christmas in not a particularly good spot, then all of a sudden they figured out a chord sequence that became one and ... back to glastonbury. it felt like something was missing, the key element explaining how they overcame these seemingly insurmountable problems (bono said in the Q&A the next day at TIFF that on a scale of 1-10, the likelihood of them actually splitting up back then was a 9. if so, then how did they retreat from that seeming point of no return?).
that said, i really liked it. i was fascinated by the creative process (i had no idea bono did scat singing and made-up lyrics just to work out the melody, but it explains a lot about why he often goes off book in concert -- he probably doesn't remember which are the proper lyrics and which are the made-up ones), and i learnt so much about what makes them tick as a unit. plus, larry's glare when he's in drag for the 'one' video is almost worth the price of admission alone.
if you're a U2 fan, you'll probably love it. if you're a music fan, you'll probably like it. if you already think bono's too full of himself or a pretentious twit, this probably won't change your opinion one bit.