I Saw the Light – first look review

Refus­ing to take a leaf out of the book of its worka­holic, 11-mil­lion sell­ing coun­try trou­ba­dour sub­ject, Marc Abraham’s I Saw the Light is a defi­ant­ly uncom­mer­cial take on the life a times of Hank Williams, a hell­rais­er with a glint in his eye who, if lead­ing man Tom Hid­dle­ston is to be believed, also had the broad­est beam­ing smile on the cir­cuit. At one point, Williams’ slide gui­tar play­er bemoans that the songs they play – toe-tap­ping, three-chord dit­ties which exist to please the mass­es – are too basic, and what Abra­ham has done in response is pro­duce a very sim­ple, straight, three-chord biopic which (unlike Hank’s music) avoids sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and trite romanticism.

The film takes place dur­ing the ​’40s and ​’50s, in and around the south­ern states, most­ly Alaba­ma and Nashville. Yet it isn’t just set dur­ing that era, but has been made as if it’s some throw­back to the films of that era, most notably Antho­ny Mann’s excep­tion­al 1955 film, The Glenn Miller Sto­ry, star­ring cap­tain avun­cu­lar him­self, James Stew­art. The film is built up of pri­vate episodes and a few hip-shuf­fling live per­for­mances, fused togeth­er via lan­guid cross­fades and large­ly shorn of expo­si­tion – the song­writer, pro­duc­er and Williams con­fi­dent, Fred Rose (Bradley Whit­ford), fills in some of the infor­ma­tion gaps and tees up scenes with inter-cut doc­u­men­tary inter­view sequences.

There’s a sat­is­fy­ing messi­ness to the struc­ture, in that we roll through the years with­out any hint of what’s going to hap­pen next. Unlike the cur­rent wave of Wiki-pow­ered juke­box musi­cals (Get On Up being the most recent offend­er), there’s no con­ces­sion to misty-eyed nos­tal­gia. Abra­ham doesn’t try and load cru­cial moments with undue mean­ing, or attempt to sug­gest that cer­tain instants in Williams’ life direct­ly inspired his song­writ­ing. There are no cheesy eure­ka! moments or attempts to shoe­horn this mate­r­i­al into a con­ve­nient moral les­son about the work­ings of the cre­ative soul. It doesn’t chas­tise Williams for his wom­an­is­ing or his drink­ing, and coun­ters received biopic wis­dom that these vices are always the cause of com­mer­cial downfall.

One ele­ment that’s espe­cial­ly great about the film is how hushed it all is – much of the dia­logue between Williams’ and his long-suf­fer­ing wife, Audrey (Eliz­a­beth Olson), is whis­pered, and it gen­er­ates this mel­low, rhap­sod­ic atmos­phere that works in dul­cet tan­dem with Dante Spinotti’s shim­mer­ing, gold-brown cin­e­matog­ra­phy. The cam­era push­es in close to the actors faces dur­ing these dia­logue sequences, reveal­ing the sub­tle nuances of expres­sion and the pal­lor of the skin dur­ing the high times and the low. Nei­ther Olson nor Hid­dle­ston ever grasp for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to deliv­er a Big Act­ing Moment, allow­ing instead for a stripped-back inten­si­ty to hove in – some of the long paus­es between exchanges are, in and of them­selves, the wow moments in this movie.

On a super­fi­cial lev­el, Hiddleston’s lead per­for­mance is high­ly enter­tain­ing, and he cap­tures Williams as a lanky, charis­mat­ic sweet­heart with a dark heart beat­ing in his chest. The musi­cal per­for­mances are superb, with Hid­dle­ston even nail­ing the famous segues into Appalachi­an yodel­ling that form the bridges of chart hits like Lovesick Blues. Williams var­i­ous bouts of ill­ness, much of it due to alco­hol but also his suf­fer­ing from spina bifi­da, are also nev­er used as a rea­son to jus­ti­fy his actions. It under­stands that it must have been deeply trou­bling – both phys­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly – to have to shoul­der these con­di­tions, but he did so as best as he could, and it light­ly affect­ed his char­ac­ter rather than ful­ly shaped it.

And yet there’s no sense that Hid­dle­ston wants you to fall in love with his Ol’ Hank. He doesn’t want you to hate him either. He sim­ply demands that you empathise with him, to see that he did some things which might seem cow­ard­ly and obnox­ious, but he remained some­thing of an inno­cent, that he made deci­sions with­out the mind­set of a hay­seed philosopher.

At one point Hank is puz­zled when he hears that a jour­nal­ist has described him as a ​“genius”, and I Saw the Light under­stands that famous peo­ple are worth talk­ing about, their lives worth explor­ing, even if they didn’t hap­pen to have done things that shook the foun­da­tions of the world as we know. It’s a hum­ble, cour­te­ous, melan­choly film, like one of Luke The Drifter’s low-slung folk ballads.