Marc Abraham (2015)
As Hank Williams in I Saw the Light, Tom Hiddleston is a very distinctive presence – rather as the title character in ET: The Extra-Terrestrial is distinctive. It’s easy enough to accept that the world of Country & Western had never known anyone quite like Williams. It’s impossible to believe in the polished, aseptic Tom Hiddleston as a good ol’ local boy made good – a hero of his people in Jefferson County, Alabama. What’s more bizarre is Marc Abraham’s thoroughly unnecessary determination to make Hiddleston stand out. He sings ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ over the opening titles, in a spotlight, with no one else in sight (the spotlight is golden yet somehow chilly). This is a foretaste of the protagonist’s remoteness in what follows. In the concert sequences of the film proper, Abraham has everyone else underplay, as if he’s after a semi-documentary effect, while Hiddleston performs in a different style, on a different wavelength. Hank’s musicians are back-up to a visiting dignitary, a cultural alien. Hiddleston’s singing is accomplished and he looks to be enjoying himself but he’s doing an impression of a C&W singer as a type: he doesn’t remotely suggest the real Hank Williams. The pleasure of watching and listening to Hiddleston comes largely from the amusing improbability of the whole enterprise, in view of his other screen roles to date.
I Saw the Light, which Marc Abraham adapted from a biography by Colin Escott, George Merritt and William MacEwen, moves through the last eight or so years of Williams’s short life, from 1944 to his death, at the age of twenty-nine, on New Year’s Day 1953. Abraham shows some signs of wanting to pull away from biopic clichés but the downbeat naturalistic style of acting that prevails can’t conceal that his script is a collection of standard set pieces – especially in the coverage of Williams’s personal life: the drink-and-drugs addiction, a marriage disfigured by a combination of jealous possessiveness of his wife and unfaithfulness to her, and so on. That these were facts of Hank Williams’s life – as they were of Miles Davis’s in Miles Ahead the other week – isn’t enough: a writer-director needs to explore or describe these price-of-fame afflictions in ways that make them, if not surprising, somehow individual to the subject of the film. Abraham uses black-and-white, faux-documentary interviews with music industry talking heads to frame the narrative – itself a familiar device by now. When Hank says goodbye to his family on New Year’s Eve 1952 and gets into the car that will take him to the concert hall he’ll never reach, the accumulation of significant looks exchanged is enough to make this the most telegraphed biopic scene of its kind in some time.
At least Tom Hiddleston’s incongruousness counteracts the film’s generic feel. On stage at the Grand Ole Opry etc, he doesn’t suggest any connection with his band or with his enthusiastic audiences. Off stage, he doesn’t connect much either with Elizabeth Olsen, as Hank’s first wife Audrey Sheppard, or with Cherry Jones, as his mother. (Olsen copes well with the thankless task of playing a woman lacking charm both as a person and a performer. Although the mother is only a small role, Jones registers in it.) There are a couple of moments in which Hiddleston’s trademark detachment is particularly noticeable. Hank Williams dashes into the hospital where Audrey has just given birth to their first child. Meeting the doctor who’s delivered the baby boy, Hank is so excitedly grateful that he can’t stop shaking the doctor’s hand. You can see that Hiddleston is going through the motions – it looks as if the pressure of the handshake is coming more from the doctor (Vito Viscuso) than from Hank. Later on, he storms out of a magazine interview in a New York hotel, still holding the glass he was drinking from. He places the glass on the roof of a car in the street outside – the way that Hiddleston does this, places really is the word. He carefully puts the glass in what looks like a prearranged spot.
Yet a few things Tom Hiddleston does in this film made me think there could be something to him as an actor after all. At a party at his house, a well-oiled Hank stands outside in the freezing cold, delighted and mesmerised by repeatedly pushing a button to open and close his garage door – the little laugh in Hiddleston’s throat is really good. Hank and Audrey’s quiet duet of ‘I Saw the Light’ as a lullaby for their baby is nicely, naturally done. The darkening of Hiddleston’s hair and eyebrows makes his skin look pallid and mostly reinforces his artificiality; but when Williams sits on a sofa, trying out his new composition ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’, the pallor helps and Tom Hiddleston gives off a convincingly exhausted quality. In these odd moments, he suggests a human being. Mention of Hank Williams’s last famous song is a reminder that I Saw the Light isn’t the first movie version of his story. Your Cheatin’ Heart, directed by Gene Nelson and starring George Hamilton as Williams, was made in 1964. Although I didn’t go to the pictures much as a child, that’s where I saw Your Cheatin’ Heart, as a ten-year-old. It was the supporting feature to One Spy Too Many (1966), in the Man from UNCLE series.
11 May 2016
