Movie Review: Greetings from Tim Buckley

So yesterday was my birthday (thanks for all the birthday wishes ya'll) and because I'd already celebrated it with my husband over the weekend by going to an actual theater for once to see real live performance (Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, for those of you curious, and instead of creating another review of that performance, I'll just say it was an entertaining piece of cotton candy, fluffy and fun and forgettable once it was over) we decided not to go out on my actual birthday and instead stayed in and just for funsies, he let me pick the movie. I usually get the privilege revoked on account of some of my more horrible movie choices I've made in the past but since it was my birthday, he relented and let me pick.

So I picked Greetings from Tim Buckley. Now before I get started, let me just say I know only the sparsest bits of information on both singer songwriters featured in the movie. I never followed either of them musically and I only knew that Tim had a son named Jeff and they were both into music and their lives were both cut way too short.

After watching Greetings from Tim Buckley, I knew about the same as I did when I started. The movie gave me no insights into either of them and told only the thinnest of stories in the most meandering ways. It still had its own beauty (that beautiful scene of Imogen Poots singing) and was a perfect platform for the music in which it lovingly featured, but it didn't do much else but leave me with a lot of questions that only a scouring of Jeff Buckley's Wikipedia page actually helped answer.

I was worried that maybe not being a Jeff Buckley enthusiast, I didn't get or understand the movie, but then I remembered the review from My New Plaid Pants (a beautiful, well written review, as @JAMNPP reviews often are and one of the reasons he's pop culture co-pilot) and I realized that it also left Jeff Buckley fans as out in the cold as it left me, which at least left me validated but confused in regards to what the film maker was trying to accomplish. The way the two stories of father and son were inter-weaved was distracting and pointless. And really, I think the story should have been about Jeff and how he made a peace with his father or revisited his father's work and life and less about his father's douche-baggery. I get that there's probably a lot more to his father's story as well and I am interested, but separately not together, especially if it accomplishes nothing.

Overall, a beautiful movie going nowhere. B-