Nostalgia

Movie: Pearl Jam Twenty

My Rating: 4 stars

This documentary was really a nostalgia piece for me.  I came of age in the 90s, so all this grunge music will always have a special place in my heart.  But, since this topic always stirs up warm, fuzzy feelings for me, I may be a little biased toward the subject matter.  Consequently, it’s hard for me to tell whether this is actually a good film, or whether I’m just a supportive fan.  I guess on some level, it doesn’t really matter.  I’m not really interested in watching documentaries about bands that I never listened to, so I can’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t into Pearl Jam would be particularly drawn to this documentary.

Even with my particular partiality, I thought this film was really interesting.  While I enjoyed Pearl Jam’s music as an angsty teen, I never really focused my energy on learning very much about the band’s history, or about the individual members as people.  I reserved that sort of obsessive fan treatment for Nirvana.  So, I actually learned a lot of new information from this documentary (including what catty, jealous, jerks the guys from Nirvana apparently were.  Oh well!).  I guess these musical rivalries will always exist.  But, the film did clear up one question in particular that had been bothering me for some time—the question of why Pearl Jam never really had any good music after the band’s first album, Ten.  It seems like if a band is able to write good music once, they’d be able to do it again.  That talent hasn’t gone anywhere.  Of course, things are always trickier than they appear on the surface.

In this case, the answer lies in the relative power of each band member at different points in the group’s history.  It seems that when Eddie Vedder first joined the band, a lot of the music for the first album had already been written.  He was the new guy, and a little timid at that, so he was happy to sing anything that was put in front of him.  But in time, Vedder developed into a pretty powerful, influential front man, and at that point he started wresting some of the creative decision-making away from Stone Gossard.  Unfortunately, musical composition isn’t the same as singling, and it wasn’t exactly where Vedder’s talents lay.  Oh sure, he was pretty good at writing lyrics for songs, but that’s a significantly different skill from writing music.  And unfortunately, the band’s later albums suffered.  It’s really a shame.

Overall this is a pretty fair documentary.  It was a collaborative effort, so it examines the band’s legacy from all angles, presenting each member’s strengths along with his weaknesses.  And, the doc is full of all the music the group’s fans would want to hear.  It’s pretty satisfying—even though it does tend to “humanize” some of our old idols in a way that takes some of the polish off their legacy.