BREAKDOWN: 1975 (B+) - As advertised, this Netflix documentary breaks down the year of 1975, mostly (but not exclusively) through the movies released during perhaps the greatest year of American film. To the strains of Donna Summer's disco purrs, we're told in the opening (by narrator Jodie Foster of "Taxi Driver") that America was experiencing a nervous breakdown, and it sure felt as if, as Gerald Ford put it, we were locked in a "long national nightmare" even after we drove Nixon out of office.
To quote Al Pacino's bank robber in "Dog Day Afternoon," as he negotiated with police after robbing a bank to fund an operation for his transsexual partner: "I'm dyin' here!" Both unemployment and inflation hovered at 9 percent. America had just lost a war. We were a hot mess.
Morgan Neville ("20 Feet From Stardom," "Won't You Be My Neighbor") knows how to craft a compelling narrative, and here he immerses us in the good, the bad and the ugly from the depths of one of the grimmest decades in recent memory. (The 2020s sure are making a case to compete against that time a half century ago.) He has a lot of material to work with in 1975: poor Gerald Ford cleaning up after the disgraced Nixon, trying to "whip inflation now"; the end of the Vietnam War; school busing; the Church Committee unmasking the tyrannical sins of the federal government; the oil crisis; the feminism wars; the specter of Ronald Reagan (seen in a clip on the "Tonight Show" with his buddy Johnny Carson); the creeps from Est. America was faking patriotism and community for its upcoming Bicentennial. No wonder there was nostalgia for the '50s -- "Happy Days" challenged the present-day dolor of "All in the Family" on TV. A bolder future, too, could be glimpsed: Microsoft was founded in an Albuquerque garage in 1975.
Check out these titles of esteemed releases that year: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Nashville," "Shampoo," "Jaws," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Night Moves," "Smile," "Three Days of the Condor," "Mahogany," "Hester Street," "Barry Lyndon." December 1974 releases carrying over in theaters included "The Godfather: Part II" and "Young Frankenstein." Neville likes to make broader points through film clips. He twins the fall of Saigon with the scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" of the knight in defiant denial as his limbs get hacked off one by one. He pits the progressive Betty Ford against the robotic nostalgist Nancy Reagan via clips from "The Stepford Wives."
There were the pulpy dystopian films: "Towering Inferno". "Rollerball," John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13." (Coming in early 1976 would be "Taxi Driver" and "Bad News Bears.") Airier fare still had a bit of an edge: "The Sunshine Boys," "Cooley High" (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs is a talking head), "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," "Tommy," "Love and Death." "Emmanuelle 2." Neville ties in TV clips, too, including the dark comedy "MASH" and the debut of "Saturday Night Live," represented here with the iconic word association sketch between Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor.
Observers include Albert Brooks (who made short films in the debut season of "SNL"), critic Frank Rich, comedian Patton Oswalt, Variety's Peter Bart, Joan Tewkesbury (who wrote "Nashville"), critic Wesley Morris, author Rick Perlstein, and Naomi Fry. Oswalt captures it all perfectly when he re-imagines selling his date on a night out at a movie featuring Jack Nicholson as a statutory rapist in an insane asylum. We get fascinating clips that revive the ugliness of the era, such as the 1975 Academy Awards show, where old-timers Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and John Wayne defended the Old Boys Club vs. the American New Wave, represented by Dustin Hoffman.
Dial back the clock a half century if you dare. At least some of us can boast that we survived the shit-show.
SONG SUNG BLUE (2008) (B) - This documentary from 20 years ago is much darker than the recent fictional version (with the same title) of the story of Lightning and Thunder, the real-life couple whose Neil Diamond tribute act suffered from real-life setbacks.
Things are depressingly real for Mike Sardina and his wife, Claire, mostly in the health challenges they faced during the period of the documentary, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Greg Kohs (who got a screenwriting credit on Craig Brewer's highly entertaining holiday release) gets extensive intimate home-movie access to the Sardina's and their working-class home life.
Sardina died in 2006 at age 55. and he and Claire battled obesity (his solution was to resume smoking to lose weight), in addition to her loss of a leg in a freak car crash on their front lawn. The true footage is much grimmer than the feel-good feature film, as you'd expect. Things go sideways by the 20-minute mark and the couple never really recovers (despite Mike dismissing their schneid as a mere "bump in the road"). The Midwest accents are authentic, but so is the dour day-to-day slog, the domestic tension of a blended family. "The Brady Bunch" this is not. Then there is Claire washing her stump in the tiny bathroom sink. Kate Hudson doesn't have quite the chops to pull off something that haunting.
Sardina gives monologues for the camera and parades around in his underwear, like Hugh Jackman does jovially, but his character arc does not fit the Hollywood model of a hero's journey toward redemption. It is painful to watch the pair perform to empty dingy clubs, or to a smattering of curious onlookers at the Wisconsin state fair. At the hour mark, Mike has a major heart attack, and the slow slide to his demise is baked in.
So, go ahead, chase your dreams. Enjoy them before the nightmares overwhelm them.
BONUS TRACKS
Three representative songs from 1975, starting with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Breakdown"
Heart, "Crazy on You":
And the biggest-selling single of 1975: Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" (penned by Neil Sedaka, another '50s nostalgia act):
And here is Lightning and Thunder onstage with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, having fun with Diamond's "Forever in Bluejeans":
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