Black and White and Blue All Over: Bruce Weber's Chet Baker Portrait Let's Get Lost

LET'S GET LOST
(Bruce Weber, US, 1988, 35mm, 119 minutes)

Almost blue / It's almost touching it will almost do
There's a part of me that's always true...always.
--Chet Baker sings Elvis Costello

It's too bad, really, that Bruce Weber has become best known for his Abercrombie & Fitch photographs. They all look the same. The male models have muscular bodies, smooth chests, and square jaws. Their hair is usually tousled. Their pants usually hang off their hips--if they're wearing any. It's a look. It's a lifestyle. It says: I'm good looking, vain, and possibly braindead.

That description doesn't apply to slightly-built jazz man Chesney "Chet" Baker, Jr. Okay, he was movie-star handsome in his heyday, but he wasn't stupid and nor was he devoid of talent. If his version of "My Funny Valentine" doesn't break your heart, you're one stony cat. Others have sung it with greater finesse, but few with more aching vulnerability.

Oddly enough, though, his Oklahoma offspring, two boys and one girl, resemble A&F models--or at least they did in 1987 when Weber filmed them. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's unlikely Weber, the director of Broken Noses and Chop Suey, would mind. His newly-restored documentary also ping-pongs through time. It's an increasingly trendy technique that comes across as unnecessarily convoluted in the wrong hands, but Weber's film plays more like musical improvisation than conventional biography.

He starts by contrasting the pretty trumpeter of the 1950s with the rumpled vocalist of the 1980s. 

Since all of the footage is in black and white, the transitions are seamless. In fact, though a few subjects reference the 1960s and 1970s, Weber avoids the color era altogether. Instead, when he isn't excavating archival material (stills, TV appearances, and film clips) or shooting interviews, he sets their words to seemingly random images. Baker liked dogs--as does Weber--so there's a scene set in Santa Monica, in which Jeff Preiss's camera captures some puppies at play. The owner is never identified. It shouldn't work, but it does.

I couldn't say for sure what Baker was doing during those lost years. Associates suggest he was shooting smack, working menial jobs, and avoiding his four kids; he also had a son with his first wife.

Weber concentrates on Baker's most famous personas--the popular musician of the past and the cult figure of the present--before exploring his complicated family life. Along the way, he speaks with two of his significant girlfriends. And once Ruth Young, jazz singer and studio head's daughter, hits the screen, the whole thing comes alive. Not that Let's Get Lost was dead before, but when Baker talks, he talks very...verrrry...slooowwwly.

The fuzzy-haired singer waxes rhapsodic about their tawdry times together. She's certainly a ballsy chick, but Young seems reliable enough. 

Baker's ex-wife, however, presents a darker side to the Ruth-and-Chet story. And everything changes. What had seemed like a fairly straightforward narrative, in terms of content rather than chronology, grows more complex. Speakers contradict each other throughout the film--Baker included. Despite all he has been through, though, his recall is surprisingly good.

Nonetheless, the director doesn't answer every question or fill in every blank--and that must've made jazz fans hot around the collar, since they live for record labels and session dates--but Weber brings his subject to gloriously cantankerous life, though Baker died shortly after filming wrapped. Because his death was ruled accidental, it's hard to say whether he was dying during the shooting session. I suspect he was. Only 57 in 1987, the musician looks much older. Which isn't to say he looks terrible.

By the early '70s, his prettiness was gone, but Baker never lost his innate cool. Nonetheless, most reviews make it sound as if he morphed into some sort of monster. In his otherwise excellent Village Voice piece, Jim Ridley describes Baker's face as a "drawn, hollow-cheeked death mask." 

The Washington Post's Hal Hinson uses the word "ravaged," adding that Baker's face was "scarred by age and hard living." 

Believe me, it's not that bad. As Ridley qualifies, "Yet there is beauty in the vestigial traces where beauty has been--and the impermanence of beauty is Weber's true subject."

If anything, Weber tries too hard to beautify his portrait by surrounding Baker with young things like Tim Burton player Lisa Marie and Red Hot Chili Peppers bass player Flea (who would later appear in Preiss's Low Down). 

Those particular sequences do play much like live-action magazine or catalog layouts--hey, once a fashion photographer, always a fashion photographer. Or at least, that's the world to which Bruce Weber has returned. Then again, maybe he only had one great film in him. In which case, I'm glad he made it, because Let's Get Lost is a great film.

Almost me / Almost you / Almost blue.
--Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom (1982)

Part of the annual series EARSHOT JAZZ FILMS, Let's Get Lost plays the Northwest Film Forum from Oct 26- Nov 1. (A DVD release is planned for later this year.) Other highlights include Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer and Imagine the Sound, Ron Mann's profile of four free jazz proponents. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. For more information, please click here or call (206) 329-2629. Images from ADRC and Deadline (Chet Baker, older and younger), The Fashionisto (Carl and Lane Carlson for A&F in 2001), and GQ (Bruce Weber and friends), lyrics from Lyrics Freak.