They Shot the Piano Player

Grade: C-

They Shot the Piano Player has inspired ideas, and is based on an interesting story not told very often – so it’s disappointing that it doesn’t work. It would have made a perfect animated short, lasting around 20 minutes. At that length, the parts I liked would have more impact, plus it wouldn’t be long enough for me to get tired of the material I didn’t care for as much. As it stands, at 103 minutes, it’s stunningly uneven.

Francisco Tenorio Júnior was a Brazilian keyboardist who mysteriously disappeared while on a tour stop in Buenos Aires in 1976. He went out one night to get sandwiches, and has never been seen since. They Shot the Piano Player’s main character here is Jeff Harris, a fictional writer for the New Yorker who is in the process of writing about bossa nova music. One thing the movie gets right is how the animation makes the few-and-far-between musical segments come to life. Visually, it made me think of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life (the latter appeared on my top ten list for 2001), and the Comedy Central show Dr. Katz. It looks great.

In his research, Jeff is enamored with a piece he hears on a CD. It’s Tenorio. This causes him to develop a near-obsession with getting to the bottom of this story. And here, They Shot the Piano Player devolves into docudrama mode, and gets bogged down with interviews, facts about the regional politics, and the like. Estimating conservatively, at least 35% of the film isn’t in English, and my subtitles were spotty and inconsistent. There were chunks where I just didn’t have anything. I doubt it would have helped much; I just couldn’t get that invested anyway. I’ve brought up my embarrassing “user error” story from when I watched Cold War (I saw most of the movie with no subtitles), and I still ended up recommending it.

Jeff Goldblum brings his usual warm approachable tone to the voice of Jeff Harris. He’s always shined when he plays curious and inquisitive characters, so this is an appropriate fit for him. I was looking forward to settling in for a Goldblum-led animated fantasy with tons of great music, but got this disjointed talky borefest.

This is the second movie in a row I’ve seen that I thought was bad, but had a great ending. They at least stick the landing and bring the main idea home. This novelist, working on a book about something else, lucked into a piece of music he loved, which took him down a rabbit hole of investigating what happened to the musician who played on that record. In light of this, he decides to abandon his initial literary idea and make his book about these new things on his mind. If only this had shone through more. I have a friend who said he felt Brokeback Mountain was too much “brokeback” and not enough “mountain.” You could say They Shot the Piano Player has too much “shot” and not enough “piano player.”

Grade: C-