Sundance Review: Edgar Wright Pays Tribute to Two Unsung Greats in ‘The Sparks Brothers’
“They are a total enigma … They’re a band you could look up on Wikipedia and know nothing.”
In addition to being a cinephile, Edgar Wright just so happens to be a music junkie. His annual ‘Best Songs of 20xx’ lists and curation of music throughout his filmography are emblematic of his love, but if you were to sit down with him and talk music, chances are the conversation would eventually lead to the Sparks. “Who are the Sparks?” you might ask, “I’ve never heard of them.” You’re not alone in your questioning, but it's an inquiry that Wright wants to answer en masse and with emphatic enthusiasm in The Spark Brothers.
The Sparks are “the greatest band you’ve never heard of,” as Wright puts it. At the center are two brothers from Southern California who grew up on The Beatles, Saturday matinees, and coastal beaches: Ron and Russell Mael, two characteristically unique individuals who have made twenty-five albums together over the span of five decades, amassing to a mind boggling 345 songs. Statistically speaking, those are insane numbers, but it's the content and quality of the Maels’ work in tandem with their personas that made them so influential, qualitative metrics that Wright makes sure to highlight over the course of his documentary.
Adorning a similar format to Jake Paltrow’s and Noah Baumbach’s De Palma, Wright progresses chronologically through each album in the Sparks’ discography, citing its significance both from a musical stand point and a place in the brothers’ careers. Pairing with the seven decades worth of archival material are talking-head interviews. A conventional device of the genre, the eighty interviews Wright conducted himself service the doc’s core thesis in an additive manor; it’s one thing to hear Wright profess his admiration, but the supporting testimony of New Order, Flea, Franz Ferdinand, Duran Duran, and fellow Sparks fans help lay credence to the Sparks prolific status.
With each album, a fuller picture comes together of the ineffable personas exuded by the titular brothers. Russell, the confident frontman singer, and Ron, the reserved lyricist and keyboardist, are both positioned as inseparable compliments of equal brilliance, each contributing their own skills to make the band greater than the sum of their parts — though Ron will cheekily tell you otherwise. Wright places a due emphasis not only on their talent but also on the traits that made them larger than life characters. Their showmanship on stage, their witty retorts in interviews, their artistic vision, and uncompromising nature all culminate in an overwhelming validation of Wright’s thesis: that the Maels are one of a kind geniuses.
Wright’s narrative films are known for their stylistic flourishes, and the same is true here. Animated B-roll of three varieties makes an appearance to help fill in the spaces where archival footage is lacking. One makes use of 3D paper clipping stop motion, another geometric cartoon animation, and a third for claymation. Feeding into the B-roll menu are inter-title cards with dictionary definitions of words pulled from song or album titles, and a curation of stock footage and cinematic clips reflect the sentiment at any given moment on screen. The mixture of these disparate elements cultivate a playful aura, a stylistic flurry that doesn’t take itself too seriously and graphs nicely with its subjects’ subversive nature. In total, The Sparks Brothers is not completely removed from the talking head subgenre of documentaries, but it is a stylish entry nonetheless.
It feels somewhat befitting that a band whose music escaped categorization now has a documentary from a director whose filmography also skirts classification. In his Sundance intro, Wright emphasized his desire to convey the importance of the Sparks in the history of music, to make their case as one of the greats. If you’re like me, millennial ignorance will make you a blank slate for Wright’s proposition, but in the span of two hours, Wright has certainly made me a believer in the inalienable brilliance of Russell and Ron Mael.
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