Zappa

I have a fascination for music documentaries and biographies. I don’t care if it’s a band I like or not, I’m liable to watch them, as long as they’re thorough and have an interesting story to tell, and not glorified puff pieces. Frank Zappa is not a musician I enjoy, but he’s one I respect for being decidedly maverick and anti-industry norms. He attained a legendary status despite never being more than a cult favorite in his time. That’s intriguing enough to get my attention. Then I find out it’s directed by Bill S. Preston Esq.? Okay, now you’ve got my eyebrows firmly arched and curiosity fully piqued. Director Alex Winter does a fantastic job here of doing what so many documentaries don’t: letting the subject tell their own story. Using literally 10,000+ hours of Zappa’s own archival footage as a basis, Winter allows Zappa to narrate his own life (with some judicious use of talking heads to fill in some gaps), and considering that Zappa was an iconoclast, the narration is not fawning or masturbatory. He is honest to a fault, and those non-Frank personalities are too, about him, his life, and his work. He is praised for his vision, but criticized for his unflinching perfectionism. He is discussed with glowing reverence by those who love him, but there is no hesitation by these people in pointing out how he was, at best, mercurial in his relationships, and at worst, cold and unable to reciprocate those feelings. His late wife speaks of their relationship with love, but is also honest about his philandering and while she found a way to make peace with it, there’s certainly a hint of wishing she didn’t have to. But the most telling of Zappa’s contradictory nature comes in bookends; at the beginning, he talks of the music that inspired him and how he couldn’t understand how it wasn’t more popular. His last performance was of some of his orchestral compositions, and when asked about getting a 20 minute standing ovation, his response bordered on confusion, as if he didn’t understand why people loved it (he even said “I guess it’s better than throwing things at me”). That is what a viewer will come away with from this documentary; he was a contradictory man to his bones, but he had an internal consistency nonetheless. He is celebrated for his accomplishments, but not lionized or sainted. It is as intimate a portrait as one can make with a man dead almost 30 years, and even if you don’t like the man’s music like me, you’ll come away with more respect for him as an artist.