It isn’t until 20 minutes into Tim Sutton’s movie that we actually hear the music of its main character, an enigmatic blues singer adrift in the titular city. Until then, we hear only the sounds of Memphis interspersed with disjointed snippets of songs, at most a creaky and catchy guitar riff building the slightest bit of momentum and then stopping suddenly. It’s an unnerving way to illuminate a story, but fitting, since Sutton’s protagonist appears to be dealing with creative block, unable to follow past success.
When the music does finally flow, it’s one of the aching songs of Willis Earl Beal, an actual musical outsider (here also named Willis). Subject of our July 9 cover story, now based in Lacey, Wash., Beal has become famous for his recalcitrant ways. Since the success of his debut album, 2012’s Acousmatic Sorcery, he rejected the music industry, dropped his record label, and moved from New York to the Northwest woods.
The Willis of Memphis seems poised to do the same. “Sometimes I wish I was a tree,” he tells two men urging him to get into the recording studio. This is the tension of the film. The larger world, seeing Willis’ “God-given” talent, urges him to make more music. As Sutton’s lingering camera reveals, the city of Memphis is filled with enough spirituality, vice, and love to serve as muse for this reclusive artist. But Willis—who tells us early that it is he alone who willed his success into being—is unable to focus long enough to make new music. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to give God, booze, or women the credit. It’s irresistible to ponder but difficult to tell, since the film offers only glimmers of context.
It isn’t just the shared name and withheld talent here that give this strange film the patina of documentary. Its style is raw and the camera unmoored—jumping indiscriminately, arrhythmically from scene to scene; training itself on nameless characters with unknown motivations; then wandering into the trees, as Willis would like to do. (The meandering, almost serial structure will be familiar to those who saw Sutton’s debut feature, Pavilion, at Northwest Film Forum last year.)
There is also a dip into insanity in a scene with Willis drunk, rolling in the street, screaming. But otherwise Memphis’ madness is confined within the mind of its hero: a disjointed mess containing some true genius, much like this film. Runs Fri., Sept 19–Sun., Sept. 21 at SIFF Film Center. Not rated. 79 minutes.
mbaumgarten@seattleweekly.com
