A mayor who never talks to his wife directly but talks with
his hands incessantly. A gregarious yet lonesome soul determined to find a
wife. An amateur voodoo practitioner. A woman dedicated to cuteness. A woman
devoted to lying in bed. A woman simply devoted to lying. A narrator who finds
them all worthy of wonderment and love. These are the inhabitants of Virgil,
Texas, the mythical setting of True
Stories.
David Byrne directed a few music videos to gear up for his transition
from Talking Head to filmmaker, and there is music video style aplenty in his feature
debut. Besides the actual musical interludes that include the “Wild, Wild Life”
video, there’s the rhythmic editing, seemingly nonsensical juxtapositions,
people and ideas that don’t exactly lead anywhere, and emotional focus that
transcends meaning that beam through the entire picture. With their script
based on some of Byrne’s doodles, Stephen Tobolowsky and Beth Henley string
together the disparate characters of True
Stories into something that makes sense even as it doesn’t not strive to
make sense. When it’s all over, you do not want to say goodbye to any of these Virgil
citizens even though they are flawed, even though they tend to lead you down narrative
dead ends, because Byrne the director and Byrne the narrator present them with
such judgment-free affection.
In a time when the nation is so divided along party and
state lines, when real villains devoted to nothing more than what is worst for
every American trample the United States, it is both heartening and sad to
survey Virgil’s fairy land of mutual understanding and acceptance. Even that
married couple who haven’t spoken to each other in years seem to do so more
because they want their own entry in the Guinness Book than because they don’t
love each other. The film itself finds a liberal from a signature New York City rock band welcomed into the heart of American conservatism. Did an America like this ever exist? I don’t know, but 90
minutes with True Stories is a warm escape from the America forced upon us today. Somehow this films makes laziness, the refusal to communicate adequately, conscienceless consumerism, and complete untruthfulness charming even in a time when America’s worst monster embodies all of these sins.
The Criterion Collection’s blu-ray edition of True Stories presents the film with its
customary flawlessness. The Texan landscape is vivid, each frame is free of
scratches or blotches, and the soundtrack ripples and booms. That entire soundtrack
makes its CD debut (though you may not find things like Annie McEnroe cooing
“Dream Operator” great listening when divorced from images of the world’s
weirdest fashion show) and leads the way among several choice supplements.
The best video extra is a new hour-long documentary on the
film, though it would have been nice if more of the cast members were among its
talking heads. There are also shorter new documentaries about how
the film’s locations have aged and Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer who
masterminded the film’s opening montage and advertising campaign. Vintage material
includes a 30-minute making-of featuring many of the original cast members in
character (John Goodman on a tour of the house that served as the Ewing homestead
on Dallas is pretty priceless) and 14
minutes of fairly interesting deleted scenes. The packaging is also praise
worthy, especially the newsprint booklet designed as a mock tabloid.
