“I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous,” says the late Elliott Smith in the opening scene of this referential, Kickstarter-funded documentary. Maybe so.
The singer-songwriter Elliott Smith was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1969, to a Vietnam veteran-turned-hippie-psychiatrist father and a music teacher mother. They divorced before he reached his first birthday, and his mother moved to Texas and remarried a man named Charlie Welch, an abusive figure who appears frequently and menacingly throughout Smith’s lyrics (“Charlie beat you up week after week”).
At 14, he moved to Portland to live with his father, detouring to Hampshire, Massachusetts, to earn a degree in philosophy and political science, before returning to Oregon to found indie band Heatmiser. In 1994, Smith released the first of six solo albums, defined by gloomy lyrics and cheery post-Beatles melodies.
In 1998, his appearance at the Oscars with the Academy Award nominated song Miss Misery – sandwiched between performances by Celine Dion and Michael Bolton – catapulted Smith into the big leagues. He signed to a bigger label, DreamWorks Records, and promptly fell into a deep depression.
He spent the early years of the new millennium battling various addictions (crack, heroine, prescription anti-psychotics) and inner-demons, but appeared to turn a corner mid-2004, when he successfully completed rehab and quit alcohol, caffeine, red meat, and sugar. By October, he was dead, from two stab wounds to the chest. His girlfriend Jennifer Chiba claimed the wounds were self-inflicted, and were in keeping with Smith’s well-documented suicidal tendencies. But the coroner’s report called it “possible suicide versus homicide,” and many journalists and conspiracy nuts have subsequently questioned Chiba’s account.
Nickolas Rossi composed this “love letter” to Smith in a quest to highlight the music, lest the work be overshadowed by Smith’s sensationalised 2003 death. Where possible the filmmaker allows Smith’s archival interviews to do the talking, alongside contributions from Smith’s sister, old friends and associates, including producer Tony Lash; Kill Rock Stars label head Slim Moon; and ex-girlfriend and (superb) bassist Joanna Bolme.
Rossi does terrific work in capturing the Portland scene before that city’s brand of hipsterism went global. But he is so determined to present the lighter side of the man who once sang “I can’t prepare for death anymore than I already have,” that we’re left with something less than half the picture.
Heaven Adores You prefers to turn up the volume of the music over images of Portland, New York and Los Angeles – the three cities that would shape Smith – rather than wrestle with the darkness. It's a noble enough aspiration: let the music do the talking. But given that Smith's lyrics often touched on his own drug abuse and depression, the film feels like a whitewash.
The bizarre and violent manner of his death is glossed over, as is his sixth studio album, From a Basement on the Hill, which was posthumously completed and released in 2004. There's nothing about Chiba's subsequent legal actions against the Smith estate. The intense focus on Smith's solo outings, meanwhile, leaves no place for such significant collaborators as Gust and Sam Coomes (Heatmiser, Quasi)
As an entertainment, the film needs about 10 per cent less TLC and 90 per cent more TMZ. But even die-hard fans will likely feel gypped by the bio-doc's unquestioning fan-love. It's almost as if Rossi sought to echo the chorus of Smith's Waltz #2: "I'm never going to know you now/But I'm going to love you anyhow."
