When you or someone you love has a chronic illness, life becomes a tightrope. There is life-or-death value in focusing on the balancing act of risk management, but if you don’t also move forward, what’s the point? COVID continues to exacerbate that contradiction, rubbing in the cruelty of a society that asks some of its members to simply survive while the rest run free. Things are back to normal, what’s your problem? Anxiety mounts as onlookers become hecklers: The circus is no longer impressed, but frustrated by your caution. At its best, American Symphony is a COVID film, filled with masks and the yearning desire for connection that accompanied the first tiptoes back into civilization. It’s also walking that tightrope. Jon Batiste, one of the biggest musicians in the world, reaches his career zenith just as his wife, New York Times columnist Suleika Jaouad, is deep in the trenches fighting her old foe: leukemia. Though filmmaker Matthew Heineman’s intimate yet simplistic documentary is not always about their relationship, American Symphony is most striking as an example of this highwire act—revealing the personal perils faced by those who, outwardly, may strike us as immune from this kind of suffering.
A throughline of suffering, tenuous as it is, seems antithetical to Batiste’s smiley persona. Though we see glimpses of him at political protests, the spindly bandleader and composer most frequently offers up a surface-level “coexist” vibe, one assured that everyone can place their troubles aside to share in some collective expression. (Expression of what, exactly, the film is not keen on digging into.) American Symphony itself is at its most mundane when focused on the professional life of the rousing, youthful musical multihyphenate. And, because it builds its structure around the creation and premiere of his first symphony, much of the film bundles that mundanity into the kind of behind-the-scenes footage accompanying a concert doc.
Batiste, in awe at his own rehearsal (“Never seen a conductor in Jordans before,” he quips to one of his players), has an arm’s length charm. We’re here to get a better sense of Batiste, not understand his music, let alone see the process of composition. But his moments of leadership are introductory platitudes, any real instruction left outside the frame. He claims he puts pressure on those he plays with, thinking they make their best music under a little bit of hardship. We understand he’s mostly talking about himself, but his interactions with others feel especially sanitized in light of this comment.
What we do get of his music is only, fittingly, a motif: A melody, a simple theme that even the tinniest ear can hold onto and a musical line that can be turned into a narrative, evolving from a hum and rhythm pounded out on a sofa, to a piano line, to a fully orchestrated piece. We never learn the titles of American Symphony’s movements (“Capitalism,” “Integrity,” “Globalism” and “Majesty”) or see alluded-to conversations between Batiste and the Indigenous performers who join his ensemble. We get a catchy little riff, inherently reductive of the daunting achievement that dominates the runtime.
The quality and duration of access, ranging from hospital beds to the very stage of Carnegie Hall, implies an insight into his creative process and intentions that we never receive. Batiste is a fascinating subject, coming from such a legendary New Orleans jazz family that HBO’s Treme named Wendell Pierce’s trombone-toting protagonist Antoine Batiste. From Oscar-nominated scores (Soul) to a rousing late-night gig (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) to Grammy after Grammy after Grammy, he’s already at the highest levels of musical achievement—and he’s not even 40. His expansive ambitions for American Symphony owe plenty to fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis, who wrote a history-reckoning jazz composition that became the first to ever win a Pulitzer. Despite ostensibly riding alongside Batiste throughout his journey, we never really know what he’s thinking about his music beyond the sound bites.
With regards to Batiste’s music (or Jaouad’s writing), Heineman—working with much lighter material than usual, considering he made his name documenting war, drugs and America’s addiction to both—paints, at best, in disinterested broad strokes. This is just work, magnified by fame. In investigating Batiste’s side of the “double life” he and Jaouad share, one of public stardom and private struggle, American Symphony finds that vulnerability begets vulnerability. It’s easier to peer in on Batiste, shot in extreme close-ups, struggling with his anxiety than it is to truthfully observe creativity in motion. Watching an artist buried in accolades hide out in bed, on the phone with his therapist, is humanizing, but we’re no closer to really understanding him. He worries on FaceTime that, at a certain high level, “all the Black male ones crack.” Does he mean geniuses? Musicians? Or just Black men in the public eye? Fly-on-the-wall Heineman isn’t asking, and Batiste isn’t elaborating.
The closest he gets to expressing real frustration or worry comes when he’s misunderstood as an artist. Reading essays, blogs and reviews (another humanizing moment, this time of ego), Batiste notes the rampant racism dogging his career. Is he not classical enough? Too classical? Overly poppy, or not quite “mainstream” enough to deserve his awards? The category crisis is deeply coded with anti-Blackness, but that goes unspoken and the camera doesn’t follow him as his ire heads off-screen.
And yet the camera never wavers when Batiste and Jaouad are together. Aside from a stagey, reality TV-style sledding date, their life together is warm, closely observed, and filled with the little details of love. They’re both deeply affected by the music in the air (they met at summer jazz camp; Jaouad plays bass) and have an underlying silliness that steels them to hardship. They must express themselves to feel alive. Batiste brings a keyboard into Jaouad’s ward, and she begins to paint when her eyesight-blurring drugs steal the written word away. They could be any couple attempting to overcome cancer. That’s simultaneously generative of our deep empathy and disingenuous as to why they’re being filmed in the first place. It’s not hard to feel for two young people, struggling, in love. But American Symphony makes it difficult to identify the specific burdens and fascinating facets that arise when those two young people are a NYT bestseller and a multi-Grammy winner.
Jaouad leaves the hospital for the first time in almost a year to attend the premiere of Batiste’s American Symphony at Carnegie Hall. She does this after her doctor reminds her that her survival should not prevent her from living life. When living with this kind of illness, you have to choose your battles, but you should always battle. We get glimpses of the performance, revolving around a potential disaster: The power goes out on stage, leaving it up to Batiste’s musical heroics to save the day while they bring it back. He plays it off so well that it doesn’t seem like anyone who covered the premiere at the time actually noticed. In this climactic bit of symbolism, where Batiste artistically perseveres through all life throws in his path, a manipulative montage of recently played footage bursts in like a blast of Muzak. Heineman doesn’t trust our memories or our sense of empathy, hammering his tearjerking stills like Batiste pounding the ivories. Like much of American Symphony, it’s far too calculated. During a tense piano lesson, one of the film’s most weighty scenes, Batiste’s teacher explains to him that, “If you don’t breathe, it’s like a computer—it doesn’t express anything. You want life.” That it’s easier for American Symphony to draw breath when dealing with death than with art is its most striking revelation.
Director: Matthew Heineman
Release Date: November 29, 2023 (Netflix)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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