Serious, or exploitative?
You be the judge. For my money, this searing yet little-seen dramatisation of the months leading up to John Lennon’s murder at the hands of Mark David Chapman succeeds in nailing the former whilst largely avoiding the latter.
The subject is a lightning rod of emotions
The 1980 shooting death of John Lennon outside New York’s famous Dakota apartment building, the first rock’n’roll assassination, is a touchy subject for fans of The Beatles as well as the world of popular music they sparked. So it is understandable that viewers might approach this, given the faintly lurid title, with suspicion bordering on hostility. Yet the film itself is distinctly non-judgmental, meticulously laying out directionless Chapman’s increasing obsession with J.D. Salinger’s 'Catcher in the Rye' and Lennon himself. Declaring the ex-Beatle “a phoney,” Chapman sets about planning the deed. How sick was he? “I was Mr Nobody,” he said later, “until I killed the biggest somebody on Earth.”
Full-on visual style
Cinematographer Roger Eaton and sound designer Dane Thomsen establish a jittery pace of information overload early on and never let up the assault (rights clearances for the film must have been complicated and costly). As Chapman drifts from Georgia to Hawaii with mystified Japanese-American wife Gloria (Mie Omori) in tow, the world around him becomes increasingly cacophonous, with the musician evolving into the embodiment of everything Chapman sees as wrong with the world. A good contemporary parallel, in a vastly different context, would be composer Atticus Ross’ aural strategy on the upcoming Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy. Instead of seeing a hyperreal world around him, as Chapman does here, Wilson often hears a jumble of amplified real-world noises in his head, mixed with snatches of his own music. Done properly, as in both films, this cinematic strategy can be a powerful narrative tool.
Jonas Ball
Who? This little-known, California-born actor doesn’t just play Chapman, he inhabits him with a deranged intensity that emanates from the screen (just check out his IMDb page to see how thoroughly he transformed himself for the role). This isn’t performing so much as capturing lightning in a bottle, a concentrated burst of malevolence that must have drained both the actor and his director. Which leads us to:
Andrew Piddington
Again, who? Director Andrew Piddington was 56-years-old when he finally finished the four-year shoot, which was plagued by financing challenges. The British native has showed a predilection for biographical dramas, with 1980s television work on D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry and, significantly, 'Fifth Beatle' Stuart Sutcliffe. What separates Piddington from a filmmaker like Ken Russell, however, whose career is chock-a-block full of more fanciful and surreal interpretations of real-life figures, is his strict adherence to realism and attention to detail. Save the shadowy sequence of Lennon collapsing in the atrium of his apartment building after being shot, Piddington and his small crew filmed entirely on the locations where events actually occurred: offices, apartments, and libraries where Chapman worked, lived and researched his fateful act. Additionally, every word Ball utters is taken from interviews, court and medical transcripts, which only adds to the veracity and power of this powerful, respectful and entirely unique production.
