The songs of Hank Williams are everything the new movie about his life isn’t.
Emotionally forthright, tunes like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” were perfectly poignant, ripe with universal sentiments. “I Saw the Light” sees Tom Hiddleston hand in a terrific performance in a paint-by-the-numbers biopic that avoids the soul searing greatness of Williams’s work.
The story of Williams’s self destruction isn’t unique in the annals of popular music. He lingered longer than members of the legendary 27 Club—Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse all passed away at the age of 27—but Williams was a trailblazer of the Troubled Artist Syndrome Sect. Prodigious talent plus a predilection for booze, pills and infidelity formed the man and informed his music.
We meet him pre-fame. He’s a twenty-one year old troubadour about to wed Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), a singer with a longing for fame but without the talent to back up her ambition. Their unsettled union is the thread that weaves its way throughout the story, binding together the biographical elements.
As his fame grows his addictions drive a wedge between him and the people most important to him, Audrey, his band and the Grand Ole Opry. “I’m a professional at making a mess of things,” he says. The best and truest relationship in his life comes from the people he didn’t know, his audience. They understood him in a way that those closest to him never could.
There is rich material to be mined from the life of a man who turned his troubled life experience into art, but “I Saw the Light” chooses to skim the surface. It’s the kind of movie where Williams says, “I’m sorry babe.” She says, “For what?” and, of course, he answers, “Everything.” Hiddleston brings a broken swagger to the role, a combination of charisma and vulnerability, but strains to create any kind of sympathy for a performer who was the architect of his own demise.
The music is terrific so it shouldn’t be a surprise that when the movie focuses one the songs, it sings, but when it looks at the non-musical components of Williams’s life it hits a sour note.
It’s not a spoiler to let you know the Avengers save the world in The Age of Ultron. The spectacular six have rescued the planet before and, no doubt, will save it again in future. In superhero movies the globe is always on the eve of destruction.
The original movie, 2012’s The Avengers, saw the team protect the planet from Thor’s evil brother Loki while in Superman II the Man of Steel battles three Kryptonian criminals set to obliterate our orb. A baddie named M tries to wage world war in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and recently the Fantastic Four prevented a giant cosmic entity called Galactus from gobbling up the earth.
“I see a suit of armour around the world,” says Tony Stark in Age of Ultron. “Peace in our time, imagine that.”
The movies get bigger every time out and with thirty more superhero flicks scheduled for the five years—including Deadpool, Doctor Strange and Gambit—the mind reels at the ways villains might endanger our world. It sounds entertaining but haven’t we’ve already been there? Where do you go from the threat of total annihilation?
Diminishing returns in terms of audience reaction, that’s where. We all know The Avengers will pull out all the stops to save the earth. Buildings will crumble, trucks will go airborne and giant cracks will appear where city streets used to be but by the end credits you know everyone will emerge relatively unscathed, with the bad people vanquished and the good guys grinning from ear to ear. Viewers are left with CGI fatigue, but dammit a catastrophe was averted. Again.
But we’ve been there, done that. Why not freshen things up and turn back the hands of the doomsday clock a few minutes to create tension in the form of different kinds of situations? It sounds counter intuitive—bigger is always better, right?— but imagine Captain America going mano a mano with Kim Jong-un or Iron Man shrinking down to the size of a microbe to battle cancer from the inside à la Fantastic Voyage.
The real world is a very complicated place. Every day the news delivers more bad information than all the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined. Stories of beheadings, terrorism and all manner of terrible behaviour flood the airwaves aching to be corrected by some sort of superhero. How great would it be to see warrior princess of the Amazons Wonder Woman unleash the Lasso of Truth on the Canadian Senate or weather maven Storm get all medieval on climate change?
An injection of real world issues might not make for big box office, but it certainly would infuse the movies with a sense of unpredictability—just like real life events. Real life is messy and volatile and that’s what keeps it interesting.
I understand one of the reasons we go to movies like The Avengers: Age of Ultron is to see things we’ll never witness in real life, but it’s hard not to agree with Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) when he says, “We’re fighting an army of robots and I have a bow and arrow—it makes no sense!” These movies try to dazzle our eyes—and they do!— but bringing them down to earth, literally, might help us engage our brains as well.
Brett Dalton knows he’s the gent Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans love to hate. “I get boos,” he says.
As Agent Grant Ward he spent most of the show’s first season as a gruff, but good guy. Then in a late season development, it was revealed that he was actually a spy working for HYDRA, a criminal organization dedicated to global domination.
“I get some, ‘I trusted you! I feel betrayed. My mother still believes in you!’ I get the whole gamut. It’s kind of all over the place for me. For the other actors it’s more like, ‘Oh my gosh, I love you on the show.’ For me it’s more like, ‘I love-hate you.’ I get a little of both.
“I think Ward is a character they love to hate. It’s not boo against Brett Dalton, it’s boo against the character.”
The actor, who holds a masters degree from the Yale School of Drama, had no idea there were big changes in store for Agent Ward.
“I’m glad they didn’t tell me,” he says, “because I really would have tipped my hand. They told me the episode before and there were a couple of shoot days left and even in those shoot days it kind of did me in mentally because I was thinking, ‘Am I listening like a spy? Am I giving too much away?’ All I was doing was listening in the scene. Standing and listening. But the way in which I was listening, I wasn’t so sure about.”
The fan reaction to his character’s double cross was swift.
“In the beginning some of the tweets were like, ‘I want to punch @iambrettdalton in the face.’ They didn’t say Grant Ward, they tagged me and said they wanted to punch me in the face. I thought they could have just typed in Grant Ward.”
As the show goes into its second season Dalton tips his hat to the fans. Without them the show wouldn’t exist, literally.
When Agent Coulson, played by Clark Gregg, was killed by Loki in The Avengers movie it triggered a worldwide ‘Coulson Lives’ crusade that inspired Marvel to create the show.
“The whole ‘Coulson Lives’ campaign was started by the fans,” he says, “and became this really fun, underground stencil that was seen around the world. Then Marvel got wind of it and decided to make a whole TV show around Colson putting together a ragtag group of people trying to save the world each week. The show exists because of the fans. And that’s the reason we have season two as well, because we have such amazing fans who tune in each week and follow everything and are so eager about the whole thing, They’re why we do what we do.”
