Film Review: Heaven Adores You

When watching Heaven Adores You, the recently released “documentary” on the late Elliott Smith, it certainly helps if you’re a fan.

I use the term “documentary” loosely in the same way I would use it to describe the film Room 237, a project that takes a look at the possible hidden meanings buried with in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Heaven Adores You suffers from the same, lazy filmmaking techniques when your subject is an inanimate object (a movie) or in this case—long since dead.

Told through the eyes of former band mates, producers, management, old friends and a few family members, Heaven Adores You serves as an oral history for those who not only lived with Elliott Smith, but also lived through him. If there’s one thing that’s clear by the end of the movie, his life wasn’t easy, and neither was living with him.

The project was crowd funded and made the film festival circuit in 2014, and recently found home video distribution. I was unable to make the one screening that had been organized in the Twin Cities late last year, and so on a blind buy, I ordered a copy of the DVD, thinking, “What could go wrong?”

I guess I’m selling this short. It’s not that bad. It’s just slow, and then for something that has plodded along at the pace it did, the ending and conclusion felt pretty rushed. But, as the credits started to roll, and as “A Fond Farewell” played over them "Happiness" plays of a montage of 2013 tribute concerts prior to the credits rolling, I had a self-aware moment where I realized that much like my gripe with the DT Max biography of David Foster Wallace, anyone who passes away unexpected, before their time—when you are chronicling the life they did have, of course finding that stopping point in your version is going to be difficult.

The problem in telling the story through talking heads of former friends and old band mates, and archival footage and old interviews is that to segue from one section to the next, what do you do?

In the case of Heaven Adores You, documentarian Nickolas Rossi relies on long (and I mean long) instrumental passages that take Smith’s music and juxtapose them with meandering exterior shots of cities—mostly Portland. Not that a movie about a dead singer/songwriter is going to be a non-stop rollercoaster of action and excitement, but five minute breaks where there is no dialogue and just endless shots of streets and buildings just really killed any vibe the film had been building.

Despite these structural issues, the content within Heaven Adores You is fascinating. What you learn throughout is just how many lives Smith touched, and just how difficult it was for him to be that “sensitive” musician. He made a lot of deep connections with people—directors, other performers, etc. Many of them interviewed here become very emotional when talking about him, and the impact he made on their lives.

It also tracks Smith’s journey from Texas, where he was just Steven Smith, to Portland, where he rechristened himself Elliott, the rise and fall of Heatmiser, the Academy Awards and New York, and then to Los Angeles, which was his final resting place.

What it doesn’t track, maybe on purpose, is his slow descent into substance abuse, which nearly cost him his career. There’s a part late in the film when one of the talking head interviews mentions that at some point, he would love it if people stopped talking about the “tabloid drama” surrounding Smith, and just focus on the music. And maybe that’s what this movie is about—Smith’s music, its long lasting impact, and the lives he touched.

The substance abuse sneaks up into the narrative, somewhere around the release of Figure 8, and it fails to mention all the harrowing (possibly untrue) details that are on Smith’s Wikipedia page about his concerns that someone was following him, and the sheer amount of drugs he was doing every day.

One revelation, while we are on the subject, is that many interviewed for the film claim early songs like “St. Ides Heaven” and “Needle in The Hay” were not about him—that he was writing about what he saw in Portland and that they weren’t, necessarily, about him—this news coming to me as a total paradigm shift, and just shows how good, and convincing, of a songwriter he was.

One thing that the filmmaker was granted access to was unreleased material from Smith, including the Heatmiser version of “Christian Brothers,” an acoustic take of “Son of Sam,” live versions and early demo recordings. Granted, all these bootlegs have been online in some form or another for a number of years, but it would have been nice to try to get the rights to put together a companion soundtrack to this documentary—something really for the fans.

Heaven Adores You paints a picture of a fragile, volatile, complicated artist who was loved by many and struggled with what trappings his minor fame brought him. Much like the man himself, the film is flawed and much like the man itself, it finds its end too soon.

For the casual listener, this documentary is purely ephemera; for the die-hard fan, it’s at least worth watching once. But due to its content, and the kind of overlying sadness that rests just in the background, it’s not the kind of movie that warrants a second watching.

Heaven Adores You is out now on DVD and Blu Ray.