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Bill & Ted Face the Music
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It’s Bill &
Ted: The Return – the time we’ve spent waiting for this is almost identical
to the interregnum sustained by David Lynch between Twin Peaks seasons 2 and 3 –
but with nothing Gothic, melancholic or uncanny in play here. Nor is there any
glamourising game with de-ageing techniques, as for De Niro & co. in Martin
Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019): Keanu
Reeves (Ted) and Alex Winter (Bill) present themselves to our scrutiny just as
they are now, in their mid 50s. It’s brave, and a little disquieting. What kind
of comedy can Bill & Ted possibly represent for us today? Wayne’s World (1992 & 1993), a closely related franchise in time and
sensibility, left itself safely in the past.
Although it was released both to theatres and online
simultaneously during August 2020, this belated third instalment in the highly
lovable Bill & Ted series strikes
me as one of the first genuine post-COVID movies (not that the world is
entirely beyond COVID yet, alas) – a comedy that, like Will Ferrell’s wonderful Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of
Fire Saga (2020), grabs its audience through saturation streaming on Netflix.
We are currently seeing, in this realm, an intriguing return to certain idioms
of 1980s and ‘90s Pop Cinema. The
nostalgia-niche for Bill & Ted films (me included in that demographic) is, after all, bound to be staying
indoors at present, rather than daring to venture out for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) or whichever blockbuster is
trying to reclaim the globe’s deserted picture theatres.
Post-COVID, Face
the Music is also, in its way, a perfect YouTube movie. But we’ll get to
that aspect later.
To reboot the adventures of rowdy eternal-teens Bill
& Ted 29 years down the track requires, naturally, a delicate narrative and
cultural manœuvre. This attempt starts exactly like Ghostbusters II (1989) did, only five years after its original: with our heroes washed-up on
the birthday garden party, Z-grade nostalgia or hospital entertainment circuit.
Whatever they had, they’ve lost. In B & T’s case, it’s a matter of a
certain cosmic promise never fulfilled: they haven’t managed to come up with
that one amazing song which (according to their Grand Myth) will unite the
world, bring global peace, etc.
At the end of Bill
& Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989, our shambling pioneers were on
their way to that divine destiny, presumably with the help of their 15th
century British Princess wives, Elizabeth and Joanna, recruited into the Wyld
Stallyns band – and note the subtle double standard in the gender casting here,
since neither Diane Franklin and Kimberley Kates from Excellent or Annette Azcuy and Sarah Trigger from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
are back to reprise these roles, but are unceremoniously replaced by,
respectively, Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays. (See Vanity Fair’s comment on this.) At that point, the band just needed a bit or a lot
more garage practise. It was a good note on which to conclude, both suspended
and exhilarated. Still the best of this lot, Bogus Journey, for its part, started out taking Bill & Ted’s
achieved Utopia for granted, and then sketched the malevolent, anti-B&T
counter-insurgency that fiddled with time and reality – actually killing our
heroes and giving them an eventful detour through the after-life before the
fateful Battle of the Bands in San Dimas.
So how on earth to undo these surreal predecessors in
order to generate a new plot that is still based on the writing and playing of
one fateful song? Like George Miller’s Mad
Max movies (1979, 1981 & 1985), Bill & Ted is a series that has no qualms about completely
reinventing its premise from one instalment to the next, while still hanging
onto and recycling enough familiar elements to prompt the nostalgic fun.
At the start of Face
the Music, we learn that the universe is in big trouble – inexplicably (i.e.,
according only to the zany, fuzzy logic of this series), time is falling out of
joint, and historic personages are wildly zapping from one period to another. Anything
else, anything vaguely … political? Face
the Music desperately flees almost any topical reference to current
American or global reality; it doesn’t want to alienate any potential viewer.
This reflects, in fact, an oddly conservative tendency
of many time-travel entertainments, beginning with the splendid Back to the Future trilogy (1985-1990),
and even heavier stuff like the Terminator series:
jokes about changing fads in cars, clothes and interior design are OK, but
anything satirical about the dominant governmental powers is ruled off the
table. As Jason Philip Wierzba, aligning Face
the Music with Tenet and Alex
Garland’s TV mini-series Devs (2020) as
current “stopwatch tales of entropy”, notes: “All three films
believe – or need to appear to believe – that major events of a cataclysmic
nature feel or mean only at the level of close on-the-ground associations and
intimacies”. The end of the universe, here, is strictly a family affair.
Be that as it may, within this particular fantasy, the
forecast destiny of Bill and Ted must arrive – and quickly. Just like Ghostbusters II, Face the Music takes a while to wind itself up, having started in
the brittle doldrums of non-fame. We linger a while in marriage counselling
with those now unhappy wives – a good idea that could have been a lot funnier. Dean
Parisot is a talented director who did a great job with the affectionate Star Trek parody Galaxy Quest (1999), but he can’t get the slightly lumbering script
(once again by Bill & Ted creators Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon) to work at the same zippy pace as the
previous films.
Eventually, the script bifurcates, and things get necessarily
busier. While B & T zap around in their own future – hoping to steal that
one great song from themselves – their respective teenage daughters, Thea
(Samantha Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), rummage through the past
to form a hell of a band: Jimi Hendrix, Mozart, Louis Armstrong … It’s
therefore somewhat of a “temporal pincer movement” à la Tenet! These
resourceful young women are definitely the highpoint of Face the Music – while also offering a comical, distorting mirror
to Bill & Ted’s well-known repertoire of catch-phrases and awed reactions.
But there’s more! Added into this deadline-driven whirl
is one of those Star Wars-type
Councils, where the Great Leader (Holland Taylor) goes against the wishes of
her mousy daughter, Kelly (Kristen Schaal), and sends a rather emotional
terminator-thingy (Anthony Carrigan) to wipe out various parties. In this
portion of future-world, things get very camp – an element that is new to the
generic stew of the Bill & Ted series. I detect, for example, the clear influence of the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on certain drawn-out
proceedings here, such as the re-introduction of William Sadler as the Grim
Reaper from Bogus Journey (the heavy
white make-up preserves this actor in a mythic agelessness). It would probably
be impossible to reboot this franchise today without at least a little camp
humour – yet the move threatens to hyper-ironise what was already plainly
ironic.
Face the Music manages, almost
miraculously, and without too much
evident self-consciousness (although of course it’s all been calculated to a T)
to be the most Inclusive, Diverse and Politically Correct entertainment of 2020.
The women characters are all crucial “agents” in the action (only the
soon-divorcing wives part is weakly resolved). The super-band includes People
of Colour and Asians, as well as (of course) women. There’s some dude in a
baseball cap named Kid Cudi (I confess, I’d never heard of him before this, but
he campaigned to be in the movie) cruising around spouting New Age
techno-wisdoms – his presence presumably assists in the drive to hook an
audience younger than the ageing pop-nostalgia crowd.
So the whole film hinges on that special song, an anthem
for the whole world. This is an incredibly hard element to actually,
convincingly create for a film – even one as wacky and ironic as Face the Music. How are Parisot and his
crew (including music supervisor Jonathan Leahy and composer Mark Isham) ever
going to pull that one off? It doesn’t spoil anything to reveal that this
international masterpiece has no lyrics! Voilà! – cultural and language
differences transcended in one almighty instrumental jam, as infinite B’s &
T’s distribute instruments to all the peoples of the planet.
By this late point, I readily admit, Face the Music had me in its thrall. It
had built up its frantic momentum, even if very few of the gags are, in
themselves, terribly inspired. And the ending works, against almost all odds.
After a seemingly endless set of credits – it’s only those that really remind
us that this is, after all, a big movie production, not just a Netflix Special
– there’s also a bonus extra worth sticking around for.
Between the finale of the narrative-diegesis proper
and the ultimate Easter-egg outro, there’s another, key ingredient that gels Face the Music into a spectacular
triumph of what Philip Brophy once identified as audience-product
bonding.
I am referring to the imaginary YouTube montage/collage of people everywhere,
on little video screens, vibing in the same musical groove laid down by the
extended Bill & Ted family. This resembles nothing so much as Koen Theys’
grand and giddy 2010 installation art piece The
Final Countdown (which I witnessed repeatedly at the Rotterdam Film
Festival of 2011), which assembled 2,000 YouTube clips of ordinary people
performing the opening bars of Europe’s 1986 pop hit of that name (once heard,
never forgotten … ).
In this final coup, Face the Music abolishes and remakes reality – while, at the same
time, offering its only, almost-explicit nod to reality’s lockdown during most
of 2020. As I watched the ecstatic blitz of pseudo-YouTube clips, I remembered
a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Democracy”: I’m just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little
screen.
MORE Parisot: Fun with Dick and Jane © Adrian Martin August/September 2020 |
