Marley
Directed by Kevin Macdonald
2012
Emotional responses to reggae represent a large scale, large enough for weeping to happen at both ends. Some cannot listen to it, while others claim that it’s Biblically sanctioned. With the involvement of many of Bob Marley’s collaborators, the presence of Ziggy in the producer credits, and the telling fact that the project was taken away from Jonathon Demme over 'creative differences' a few years ago, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this bio-doc approaches the musician with an unquestioning acceptance of his supreme worth as an artist. Obviously this will immediately turn off anyone who has a particular dislike for the music. Equally obvious is the fact this doesn’t matter, and that it’s to be expected of any documentary on a musician to be benevolent, creative figures rarely being controversial enough to warrant an entire film criticising them. With someone like Bob Marley, however, there’s an extra political cachet that first requires you also to accept this worth at face value. If, like me, you merely think he’s quite good, then some of the adulation can be a bit hard to swallow. It’s easy to understand his status as a trailblazer of Jamaican culture on the international scene, because he indisputably was; the more idealistic view of him as messianic healer of nations seems to the moderate to be largely fan hysteria.
Fortunately, that side of his legend doesn’t completely dominate the film. Macdonald aims for the big picture, with the intention of covering Marley’s entire life and career as it revolved around the music, and the best bits are the ones dealing with the Trench Town culture he came from. (My favourite moment’s probably when a string of reggae elder statesmen attempt to define the form. Bunny Livingston: “With reggae you’ve got 3 out of 4 beats… then you imagine the last beat.” It sounds better when he says it.) We actually start centuries before Marley’s birth, in Ghana, at the last station before African slaves were taken over the Atlantic. This has no real continuation, but still feels an appropriate starting point for obvious reasons, the legacy of that process having so much bearing on Marley’s identity and creativity. It becomes pretty clear that for all his devotion to a united future, his past and position were of utmost importance to him. Something of an outcast due to his mixed background, his embracing of the Rastafarian movement likely addressed issues of personal displacement as much as racial ones. Images of him as a teenager are disconcerting, with his short hair and poverty-smart clothes, face still instantly recognisable; then when the film moves past his conversion and dreadlocks erupt from his head, you see the famous Rastaman look in a new light: an exaggerated, theatrical identity he chose for himself.
Like all true icons, it’s difficult to think of Bob Marley in any other way than the famous version, as if he sprang into the world fully formed singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. One of the most eye-opening parts of the film in regard to the man as an artist is a series of photographs depicting The Wailers before they settled into their roots-reggae form, in which you see a group of clean-cut teenagers influenced more, visually at least, by doo-wop and early rock and roll. It demolishes the perception of Marley as an instinctive, a priori reggae musician, and reveals a person who at first just wanted to make music and release records. This is borne out in the stubborn pragmatism he showed in getting the band noticed at the start of their career, a business-like approach that would take its toll on bandmates Pete Tosh and Bunny Livingston, and which also doesn’t quite gel with the what-will-be outlook and anti-materialistic attitude he would espouse once he had found success. That said, his generosity with his earnings later on seems undeniable, and so it’s perhaps unfair to suspect a more money-grabbing side to him based simply on the fact he wanted to be discovered and make a career out of music. The desire for success isn’t the same as greed.
There are some issues around the film’s treatment of the more negative aspects of Marley’s character. That he was unfaithful to his wife is too tame a term for his womanising, which became an almost institutionalised thing, and one he justified as a traditional way of life incomprehensible to “western values”. It’s all very well playing on guilty liberal open-mindedness like that, but you suspect the women didn’t have an equal footing when it came to their own relationships. Just enough anecdotal evidence is produced for you to register the pain he likely caused. While the non-judgmental tone here seems correct in principle – after all, we’re regarding him as a musician above all else – it ultimately stands as a slightly tokenistic piece of ‘balanced reporting’ in a sea of credulous adoration; a deliberately selected flaw that can be played as charmingly rakish and hedonistic as much as cruel. Taken as a whole, the film is not balanced. The information with which to form a negative opinion is offered with a hands-off, make-of-it-what-you-will attitude that would need to be matched in the approach to his beneficial qualities, but clearly isn’t. This reaches a discomfiting climax in the retelling of Marley’s free concert at the declaration of Zimbabwean independence, the inspirational performance tarnished by the newly elected Robert Mugabe wandering about. Obviously it would be stupid to retrospectively cast the concert as a bad thing just because of what Mugabe turned out to be… but at the same time, perhaps a little recognition that the free concert encapsulated a moment, rather than embodied a solution, would have been better.
That political prominence, while meaning Bob Marley merits documentary coverage more than the vast majority of artists, also means that a hagiography such as this just doesn’t quite cut it. I mean it as a compliment to his legacy when I say it requires and deserves more scrutiny than it is really given here; you’re given the impression that everything he did was just fantastic, when it was more complex than that. There’s a sequence covering the arrival in Jamaica of Emperor Haile Selassie I: we see crowds of people, a continuous joyful mass, and we’re presumably supposed to be inspired by this celebration in unity. I couldn’t dismiss the knowledge that a good number of that multitude genuinely believed the man was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which I guess is a blown-up version of my attitude towards the film as a whole. However, I’m a pathological skeptic about anything people are being too enthusiastic about, and it did occur to me that the most important detail of the film wasn’t what Marley was doing, or representing, or whatever, but rather the huge crowds cheering him on. As superficial as his involvement in deep-seated political problems might have been if we’re being honest, the people watching didn’t think so, and whatever you think of his music, politics, religion, and home life, his status as a cultural icon is totally indisputable. The man did grab people.
Tom
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