Soul (Walt Disney Studios, Pixar Animation, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film we screened last night was Soul, a co-production of Walt Disney Studios and its Pixar subsidiary, which has been ballyhooed a great deal and called ‘a love letter to jazz,” which it really isn’t – though its central character, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx in something of a comedown after having played Ray Charles!), is an aspiring jazz musician who’s reached middle age and is still living with his mother (a successful tailor). He’s played short and ill-paying gigs as a musician and has carved out a niche as a middle-school band teacher, where he rehearses the students in “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” (a 1941 hit for Duke Ellington but actually written by Duke’s son Mercer – that was the year the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers unilaterally raised the fees to license their music to radio stations, and rather than pay the new fees the radio networks and stations formed their own licensing company, Broadcast Music, Inc. This meant music by ASCAP members like Duke Ellington couldn’t be played on the radio, so Duke had to get new material from people who weren’t ASCAP members, like his son Mercer and his recently hired arranger and lyricist, Billy Strayhorn).

The kids are playing it terribly (the movie even opened with a similarly terrible student performance – or what purports to be one – of Disney’s theme song, “When You Wish Upon a Star” from the 1940 film Pinocchio) except for one 12-year-old girl, Connie (Cora Champommier), who’s a whiz on trombone and the only member of the band who really gives a damn about music. Joe is having a crisis of conscience because the school district has offered to hire him as a full-time band teacher, and naturally his mom wants him to take it – but just then Joe’s old friend Curley (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson) gets a line that a Black woman saxophonist, Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) needs a fill-in piano player for her gig that night at the Half Note nightclub. (One wonders if the film’s writers – Mike Jones, Pete Docter and Kenny Powell, the last two of whom also directed – were thinking of the jazz world’s greatest woman instrumental musician, Mary Lou Williams.) It’s the sort of major gig Joe has been waiting for all his life, the one that might enable him to make a name for himself in the jazz world and not have to do anything but play full-time, and to signal his excitement at the prospect he runs through the streets of New York City. Alas, he is nearly run down by cars several times and ends up falling through an open manhole.

At that moment Soul pretty much stops being a movie about jazz and instead becomes a clever and charming but also pretty familiar Disney version of the afterlife. The basic premise comes from two fine films from the 1940’s, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which the carefully curated counts of who’s admitted to the world beyond death get screwed up, either by someone dying when they’re not supposed to or being missed when they were supposed to be collected. Joe ends up in a department of the afterlife in which the souls awaiting placement in bodies (and who look for the most part like baby-like blobs) are paired with genuinely dead mentors to prepare them for insertion into bodies on Earth, where they will have normal lives and then return to the world beyond. The officials in charge of this process are depicted as curved lines made to look like sketches by Picasso – an artist I don’t think Disney animators ever used as a model when Walt Disney was still alive. Joe gets paired up with Soul 22 (Tina Fey), who’s been so unpleasant that potential mentors ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa to Marie Antoinette have washed their hands of her. She’s bratty, salty-mouthed (or at least as salty-mouthed as you’re allowed to be in Disney animation, which is not very) and hates the whole idea of having to live on such an offensively boring planet as Earth. But if she can earn the medallion that enables her to transport to Earth, she can give it to Joe – who desperately wants to return, undo his premature death and play that jazz gig that will presumably make him a star.

Eventually the two of them make it to Earth, courtesy of an astral sailing ship captained by Moonwind (Graham Norton), who also has an earthly incarnation as a sign spinner on a street corner in New York. Only things get mixed up: 22’s soul ends up in Joe’s body while Joe’s soul ends up inside a cat the hospital maintains to comfort patients. The two of them go on a chase through the streets of New York looking for Moonwind to start the process to change their souls back to the “right” bodies – a gimmick that reminded Charles of the 1984 comedy All of Me, in which Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin switched bodies – and the scenes of the two walking around New York, doing typical New Yorky things like taking an uncomfortable ride in the subway (at one point Joe, or 22 in Joe’s body, picks up a soda from under a subway seat and starts drinking it, and the real Joe in cat drag knocks it out of his hand because he knows how dangerous it is just to pick up someone else’s drink off a subway) and getting Joe’;s hair cut by a Black barber Joe knew in his real incarnation. Midway through all this Joe’s suit tears and he has either to get it fixed by his tailor mom (referencing a film we’d watched earlier this week, Dr. Broadway, I joked, “It could be worse – his tailor could be a crook!”) or get another – and his mom, who hates the idea of him playing a jazz gig because his dad, also a jazz musician, spent his whole life playing ultra-low-paying jazz jobs while mom’s tailoring business supported them, nonetheless loans him his dad’s old suit.

Also along the way they meet up with Connie, who says she wants to give up playing because everyone ridicules her for it, but Joe – or 22 in Joe’s body, or something – talks her out of it. Eventually Joe finally gets in his right body, plays the gig with Dorothea Williams and looks like he’s headed on his way to jazz stardom at long last – only instead he has second thoughts and the movie ends surprisingly ambiguously, with Joe still undecided whether to play jazz or take that full-time teaching gig, though it’s a happy ending for 22, whose sojourn on Earth in Joe’s body has convinced her she wants a normal life on Earth after all. I had thought where this was leading was that Joe would take the middle-school gig, not because he wanted the regular pay, health insurance and overall security of it, but because he’s realized through his encounter with Connie, as well as his mentor relationship with 22, that his real purpose in life isn’t being a jazz musician himself but mentoring the next generation of them and thus keeping the jazz tradition alive. I was a bit disappointed in Soul because I had expected it to be more of a movie about jazz than it was – there’s nothing in the basic story that requires the central character to be a jazz musician and not a classical composer, a writer, a painter or any other sort of creative artist frustrated by the difficulty of making a living as such – though I found it charming, clever and quite entertaining.

I must admit I really don’t like the look of computer animation that much – those chunky, blocky figures really don’t have either the realism of live action or the flexibility and artistry of traditional drawn animation – but it’s become the modern-day standard (of the five films nominated for Best Animated Feature, which Soul won, only one of them was drawn instead of computerized) and, despite my overall distaste for the look, I’ve certainly enjoyed films that were done with computerized animation if the story and characters otherwise appealed to me. Soul also won for Best Original Score; the award went to Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails), Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste, though the actual credits on the film split their roles, with Reznor and Ross getting credit for the overall score (including the synthesized burbles that are the main accompaniment for the scenes set in the afterworld) and Batiste specifically credited for the jazz arrangements, and also (in a separate credit) for supplying Joe Gardner’s piano playing. (Reznor and Ross also got a separate nomination for the film Mank – the latest attempt to rewrite the history of Citizen Kane and give the credit for that film’s greatness to hack writer Herman Mankiewicz instead of genius director Orson Welles. It’s nice to know that Reznor, like Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, has been able to become a film composer after having started out with a rock band; indeed, by now Elfman is far more known for his movie work than his band.) Overall I have an oddly mixed reaction to Soul: I’m disappointed that it wasn’t the movie I was expecting (Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Charlie Parker, Bird, remains the best film ever made about jazz) but I was still entertained and at times even moved by the film it is.