Folk singer Kate McGarrigle died in 2010 at the age of 63,
leaving behind a terrific body of work and a talented family of musicians. In
2011, in a New York City concert hall, a concert was performed in her honor.
Singing her songs were her son and daughter, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, as
well as her sister, Anna McGarrigle. Other guests included Emmylous Harris,
Norah Jones, and, among many more, Jimmy Fallon, singing their hearts out in
memory of the one who wrote the songs. The event was captured on film and put
together by director Lian Lunson. The resulting concert documentary, Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A
Concert for Kate McGarrigle,
isn't much of a movie, but it sure is a great concert. It's not often that I
find myself wanting to turn off a movie's picture and just listen to the
soundtrack instead.
The music, so tenderly written, so expressively performed,
is transporting and enjoyable. It's all of a rather similar tone and cadence, a
folksy wit and carefully strummed instrumentation calling out with clarity that
the songs are from the same career, sprung from the same mind. I suppose the disclaimer
here is that if it's not the kind of music you go for, it'll get repetitive
fast. I happen to love this style of music, so I was willing to go with it.
Several old favorites are trotted out. Her kids sing "First Born,"
with its charming lyrics about a first-born son: "That first born son is
always the one / The first to be called and the last to come." Jimmy
Fallon sings "Swimming Song" - "This summer I went swimming /
This summer I nearly drowned" - which fits his persona well. Rufus, one of
many singing "Prosperina," one of the last songs she ever wrote, has
tears rolling down his face as they circle the haunting refrain "Come home
to mama."
The songs are lovely and the mood is appropriately mournful.
It seems like a good concert and a moving tribute to a mother, musician,
and friend taken away by cancer. But as cinema it's uneven and clumsily
packaged. The stage is shot simply for coverage in footage that switches
between color and black and white arbitrarily. Context is largely absent, with
sparsely commented upon home movies of Kate's younger years spliced into the
concert footage. Lunson is in the same instance doing too much and not enough
to material that's inherently powerful and entertaining. Either give us the
events plain and simple unadorned or give us the full biographical context.
Stuck hesitantly between, the movie feels overlong and unsure of its purpose.
That said, the star of the show is Kate McGarrigle's music, strong and powerful, and the friends and family breathing new life
into her words and melodies. There's not much need to see the movie, but it's
sure worth hearing. Available now on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, XBox, Playstation,
Google Play, Youtube, and SundanceNow, it'd be worth renting a stream just to
listen. I'd recommend the soundtrack album over that, but on the chance you
want to see the concert, the movie's your only option. Besides, with just the
sound you'd miss the emotion on the faces of the singers, smiling through
tears, keeping their mother's, sister's, friend's music alive. There's a
devastating anecdote snuck in at the last minute in which Rufus and Martha tell
of their mother's final moments alive, surrounded by family, playing an old
recording of her children as children singing a Christmas carol she had taught
them. She died as she lived, with love and song.
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