Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser: Reviewed by Davis Rivera

In her 1988 film “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser,” director Charlotte Zwerin reflects America’s true diversity by creating a deeply personal portrait of an aging artist that was disabled and an African American. She portrays Monk’s disabilities accurately and not at all in an exploitative way by letting the documentary be subjective and allowing the people that knew and loved Monk to make enough references to his illness that the viewer is allowed to understand the extent that this effects not only them, but Monk as well. From them we learn that Monk remained an enigma even to those closest to him. Difficult and reticent, with occasional flashes of extremely dry humor, he was obviously conscious of his aura and played off of it. But he was also intensely sensitive and temperamental and perhaps a manic-depressive. We learn through talking-head style confessions that Monk’s illness eventually made it impossible for him to perform, and he gave his last public performance in 1976, six years before his death. At the time ''Straight, No Chaser'' began to be compiled, he was too ill to be interviewed for the film, though even without Monk’s input, the film very effectively avoids becoming a self-reflexive film but still manages to interpellate members of society by defining what it means to be a true individual.

With a name like Thelonious Sphere Monk, there was never any true need for him to stand out anymore than he already did. There was a need, however (as there should be a need in every self-respecting person), to stand out as an individual, not solely relying on his name to get him where he wanted to be. This is where Monk’s life as an artist truly begins and also where Zwerin begins her film. The majority of Zwerin’s film is lifted from fourteen hours of black-and-white film shot in the late 1960’s by Michael and Christian Blackwood for a cinéma vérité television special about Monk. Broadcast only once in West Germany, the program was never shown again. The film resurfaced in 1981 when Blackwood and Bruce Ricker, the co-producers of “Straight, No Chaser,” teamed up with Zwerin. Soon after, Clint Eastwood, a life-long jazz aficionado, would lend his name to the film and also help produce it. But Eastwood’s name, even though seen seconds before the actual film begins, immediately leaves one’s mind as Monk is eventually shown in all his genius.

One of the recurring images in “Straight, No Chaser,” and also the image that opens the film, is Monk slowly spinning around and tilting his head to the sky in what appear to be deliberate attempts to disorient himself. Although the film offers no explanation for this proclivity, the depiction of Monk whirling like a little kid playing games with himself is an appropriate metaphor for his revolutionary piano style. As the rich musical soundtrack illustrates, his spare, thorny pianism, with its restless stop-start rhythms and percussive insistence, maintained a perspective on life and art that was boldly off-center, compulsively exploratory, and deeply personal. After Monk finishes his seemingly never-ending game, the camera cuts to a long shot as Monk immediately runs to his piano and begins playing a lesser known cut, “Example,” as his legs flail about wildly and he keeps his mouth open for the entire duration of the song, almost in awe of his impressive spinning from earlier, and not focusing on his technique at all. Even though Monk was already well past the beginning stages of his illness, Zwerin never once deceitfully edits this unorthodox show, bordering on freakish, into something resembling an outtake from Tod Browning’s “Freaks.” Instead, she leaves the cinéma vérité style of the original footage alone and lets the viewer make up his or her own mind on where Monk’s mind was.

Watching Monk play in this way makes one question whether Monk’s playing may have been mostly based on the right hemisphere of the brain. This explains why Monk, enormously influence though he is, has not had the sort of influence as a Jelly Roll Morton or a Bud Powell. Monk’s troubled inner musical character is almost impossible for musicians to imitate. In this opening scene alone, one can see Monk stress the use of his left hand, deliberately characterize his phrases by wrong notes, and play harmonically off by a full tone so that the tension is amplified and then left unresolved. Later in the film, as Monk is beginning to play “Rhythm-a-ling,” he begins to play two adjacent keys on the piano concurrently, maximizing dissonance in a song that was too conflicting in its original form. In a striking moment of elation he begins to shake the piano with his powerful elbows and strikes the piano keys with his flat fingers (instead of bowing them). Sure an alert viewer and someone with a mild history in jazz will be able to spot these idiosyncrasies, but as for attempting them in imitation? Not bloody likely.

John Coltrane, always reliable when it comes to asserting a fellow man of geniuses’ intellectual depth and musical freedom, without letting their shortcomings matter (in Monk’s case, his mental illness), had this to say about Monk: “You never know what may happen, in the rhythm for instance, Monk manages to create such a tension to compel his musicians to “think” rather than follow the usual clichés. He can start a phrase from a sequence you do not expect and you have to know exactly what to do. And harmonically he follows different routes from what you have in mind. But one thing I have learnt from Monk, not to fear what you really feel.” This is the essence of Monk’s power as a musician in a nutshell. I’m quoting this in full because Zwerin decided not to add this into her film. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, Zwerin obviously knew what she was doing and, by adding this in, I feel she would have diminished in some way the vaguely disturbing feeling the viewer gets while watching the film.

It is immediately apparent that there is something wrong with Monk, as I mentioned earlier in the scenes of Monk spinning in circles and playing like a madman, and unless we know the life history of Monk we don’t know what it is. If Zwerin were to add in Coltrane’s quote through narration or text on the screen here, it would have been a mistake and the viewer would have been forced to view Monk as a sort of idiot savant, maintaining her eerie atmosphere but also adding unintentional comic relief. With this left out, the viewer can see that the music is extraordinary, free-spirited and healing, but in the person of Monk there is a shadow of some kind, an elusiveness, a reluctance to connect. The movie never does put a name to Monk’s condition, but by the end of the film enough people who loved him have made so many references to it that we know what we need to know: he went steadily and quite stoically insane. Zwerin does not use this madness to her benefit by manipulating the footage to depict Monk as one of the classical stereotypes of the disabled man such as the character focused on his sociopathic inability to fit in or the defeatist who wallows in self-pity, making himself his own worst enemy. Perhaps the closest to a stereotype that Monk becomes is the disabled woman filled with childlike innocence from Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights.”

Unlike the woman from “City Lights,” Monk was not at all a completely passive person, even in his later, darker years. The last years of his life, we learn through narration and from people interviewed for the film, were spent sitting quietly in the room of a close friend. He no longer played jazz, but when friends would come over to play, they knew he could still listen, because he would leave the door of his room open. The mental illness undoubtedly must have begun many years earlier. Later in the film, Zwerin brings back the tragic recurring image that began the film. This time, Monk appears to be in an airport somewhere, as he begins turning around and around in the same place, absorbed in this repetition as if it were some kind of meditation. This is especially sad, because in the aforementioned scene, the viewer could believe that this was merely a pre-show ritual that Monk performed to relieve his own nervousness, but due to the fact that airports very seldom have pianos around, we know that Monk’s mind is drifting further and further into the abyss. Other instances of this kind of revelation are frequent throughout the film, such as pretty much anytime Monk talks, or attempts to talk in a muffled growl (similar to Tom Waits’ spoken word pieces recorded while he had laryngitis) that seems to be in a kind of code, and when he looks at the camera, he doesn’t exactly look at the camera. This last bit, to me, wasn’t quite as bad after seeing the footage of Nietzsche in his final days of madness, shivering and thin as a rail with the eyes of a serpent that has been tranquilized.

Though it is still sad that this was Monk’s end. As he got older, he coasted into himself. Apparently his reveries must have become seductively relaxing to him (but really, can you blame him?) At a certain point he withdrew completely and was no longer there for his friends and family. He was locked away inside his own mind. The film doesn’t go into detail about this steady process, and for that I am very thankful, because Monk’s music puts us in our own disposition for reverie, not diagnosis. There have been films since “Straight, No Chaser” that attempt to give an accurate depiction of mental illness in both narrative form (“Sylvia”) and documentary form (“Grizzly Man”), but few have been as successful in both its exceptional treatment of the disabled as a main character and showing its effects on the lives of those around them.