Dan Fogelman (2015)

Text on the screen at the start explains the film is ‘kind of based on a true story a little bit’.   The reality behind Dan Fogelman’s first feature as a director is its most interesting element but that arch legend is right:  the inspiration for Danny Collins is only ‘a little bit’ evident in Fogelman’s screenplay, which is based much more on never-too-late-to-make-a-new-life-and-atone-for-past-mistakes formula movies.  In 1971, the young singer-songwriter Danny Collins is the new sensation in the American rock world.   In a magazine interview, he cites John Lennon as his most important influence.  Danny also admits in the interview that he fears success may spoil him as an artist.  More than four decades later, Danny is still a star and packing in audiences but, in the intervening years, he’s written fewer songs than he’s had failed marriages.  Drinking and whoring and living off past glories have made Danny sick at heart.  His loyal manager Frank Grubman gives him an unexpected birthday present – a 1971 letter, addressed to Danny and signed by John Lennon.  It turns out Lennon read that magazine interview and, in response, wrote to tell Danny it was entirely up to him whether or not, if he became rich and famous, he compromised his creative integrity.   The letter ends by inviting Danny, if he feels the need, to get in touch with Lennon and Yoko Ono:  ‘We can help’.  Lennon sent the letter direct to the magazine in which the interview appeared and the journalist who conducted the interview never passed it on to Danny.  The journalist subsequently died, the letter became a valuable piece of Lennon memorabilia and Frank, knowing that Danny’s still a big Lennon fan, has now acquired it for his client and friend.   The letter immediately makes Danny think how different things might have been if he’d received the letter all those years ago.  He resolves to change his life – in particular, to make contact and mend fences with his now fortyish son, Tom, the result of casual sex with a fan who came backstage after one of Danny’s concerts.

Dan Fogelman is nothing if not brazen and, in a not very admirable way, canny.  Danny’s enduring songwriter’s block, in combination with the continuing shadow cast by his mentor, means there’s hardly anything for Danny to sing but plenty of Lennon numbers on the soundtrack.  The protagonist starts every show with something called ‘Hey Baby Doll (What’s Going On?’).  (The chorus of this ‘original’ song, written by Ciaran Gribbin, recalls Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’.)  Because cynical Danny knows ‘Hey Baby Doll’ is what his adoring public wants, he soon has the audience join in with the number.  He appears to fill big venues for whole evenings with a repertoire that’s a one-track singalong; the aging baby boomers in the audience, a major part of the Danny Collins fan base, are overplayed in a way that makes them ridiculous.  Once Danny embarks on his journey of rediscovery, he, of course, starts writing again – although the wet drivel that emerges from his soul means it’s a relief that he’s been uncreative for so long.  The piano introduction to his new work sounds, for a few chords, as if it’s going to be ‘Imagine’. It’s a relief too that it isn’t (especially as the Lennon original has already been heard in the film) – until Danny starts into the lyrics:  it’s spring in his heart but autumn leaves are falling.  What’s more, Al Pacino, who plays Danny, evidently can’t sing very well.   All this combines to make you feel the real ‘cynical Danny’ here is Fogelman rather than Collins.

Danny is played in the magazine interview scene by Eric Schneider, who so much resembles Pacino that I thought the latter’s 1971 face had been CGI-resurrected for the purpose.  (Another reason for thinking the face engineered is that Schneider’s, for all its eerie similarity to Pacino’s, doesn’t have quite the mobility of the real thing.)  The start of Danny Collins’s rock stardom was nearly simultaneous with the beginning of Al Pacino’s movie stardom.  When you see on Danny’s album sleeves etc what is the young Pacino’s face, the effect is rather odd:  you involuntarily wonder what Michael Corleone is doing there.  Danny Collins is heavily dependent on the affection and admiration for Al Pacino felt by audiences who’ve known him throughout their filmgoing lives but, for all Pacino’s expertise, Danny remains a very unsatisfactory character – a skimpy cliché and a pain in the neck.  His manager Frank tells the angsty Tom a story that’s meant to prove Danny’s heart of gold but it’s not persuasive.  Frank is long-suffering and long-serving:  he’s surprisingly unconcerned when Danny, after the Lennon letter materialises, decides to cancel a sold-out concert tour midway through; and he’s played by eighty-five-year-old Christopher Plummer (evincing that grand-old-actor twinkle that’s made the Indian summer of his screen career a mixed blessing for this viewer).

Dan Fogelman is shameless too in how he develops Danny’s relationship with Tom (Bobby Cannavale), a blue-collar worker with a beautiful, perfectly supportive wife (Jennifer Garner) and a young daughter with ADHD (Giselle Eisenberg, who’s likeable).  The child, whose name is Hope (!), needs special schooling which her parents can’t afford but which her rock legend grandfather can.   Tom is understandably angered by the sudden arrival in his life of the father from whom he’s estranged; you might expect that Danny needs to be taught the lesson that money can’t buy him love.  But the film, having introduced him as miserably rich, decides that lucre is a cure-all.  Not only does Hope get her school place; when Fogelman wheels out the revelation that Tom is suffering from leukaemia (a secret he shares only with his father), Danny pays for top medical treatment too – and the final scene of the film makes pretty clear that it works.

Danny Collins, unsurprisingly, ends not with a resolution of Danny’s career as a performer but with him at the centre of a happy family.  Bobby Cannavale may be too truthful an actor to be comfortable with the falseness of Tom’s easy forgiveness of Danny.  Cannavale is good in his early scenes but you want Tom, in his desperate situation, to resent, or at least have deeply divided feelings about, the extent to which he’s virtually forced to rely on handouts from his scapegrace father.  The best performance, and by far the most enjoyable, in Danny Collins comes from Annette Bening, as the manager of the New Jersey hotel where Danny goes to stay and find himself.   Bening is such a witty actress:  her comic invention here is a small miracle, given what she has to work with.

It’s worth not getting up from your seat too quickly at the end of Danny Collins.  Over the closing credits, Dan Fogelman plays film of an interview with Steve Tilston, the British folk singer-songwriter who is the real-life inspiration for the story.  According to Tilston’s Wikipedia entry:

‘In August 2010, it was reported that John Lennon had penned a letter of support to Tilston in 1971, though it was never delivered. Lennon had been inspired to write to the then 21 year-old folk singer after having read an interview in ZigZag magazine in which Tilston admitted he feared wealth and fame might negatively affect his songwriting. Tilston did not become aware of the letter’s existence until a collector contacted him in 2005 to verify its authenticity. “Being rich doesn’t change your experience in the way you think,” Lennon wrote.’

There’s no suggestion in the Wikipedia article that Tilston’s professional or personal life mirrors Danny Collins’s but his appearance has an effect similar to that of images of the real subjects of biopics, which directors often put on screen with end titles.  Those images tend be counterproductive.  They’re a reminder that we’ve been watching an impersonation; however brilliant this may have been, seeing and perhaps hearing the genuine article qualify the authenticity of the impersonation.  Dan Fogelman’s film is low on authenticity throughout but Steve Tilston is final confirmation that Danny Collins is a fake.

30 May 2015