Some gimmicky marketing nonsense cannot dim the brightness of the star subject Brian Eno in this partially computer-created documentary. The film, from the director Gary Hustwit, has been made in collaboration with “generative software” that lightly shuffles the narrative sequences for each individual screening and executes some nifty montage megamixes in the filler scenes. It means, says the project’s hype machine, that Eno is “the world’s first film that changes each time you watch!”
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Well, yes, and … the film still exists in a roughly chronological shape, with present-day Eno, smiling, sprightly and avuncular at 76, reflecting on his life and work so far, while Hustwit’s software clomps obediently through previously assembled and smartly edited (by actual human people, Marley McDonald and Maya Tippett) narrative chapters. We move logically from childhood to early successes to our protagonist’s fully fledged status as a songwriter, Roxy Music synth player, ambient champion and visionary producer of U2, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads and Coldplay.
The structural shenanigans are, it transpires, the least impressive element of a movie that functions best as a 90-minute masterclass in arts, philosophy and self-deprecation from a peerless raconteur. Eno is unafraid, while reflecting on musical melodies and his album work with U2, to segue suddenly into weighty intellectual terrain. Music, he says, taps “the strongest drive in human beings. Which is, ‘I want to belong.’” He then adds, warm but serious: “I think that singing is the key to world peace. The more singing groups there are the happier everyone will be.”
He continues like this throughout, with juicy celebrity morsels followed by daring swerves into profundity. From the first Roxy Music album to the superiority of feelings over knowledge, from working with David Byrne to a need to surrender in life as a survival strategy. He’s the perfect subject, and leaves you wanting more Eno, and fewer generative bells and whistles.
★★★★☆
90min
In cinemas
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