Movie stars are singing again. From across a century of sound cinema there have been many leading women and men who have been winning vocalists, from the first talkie generation of James Cagney and Claudette Colbert to the Dolby days and nights of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.
Many of these actors had significant youthful training that equipped them with the excellent skills at singing and dancing that are crucial to their personal entertainment brands.
But the stories behind the two recent blockbuster biopics devoted to music legends, one living one dead, tell different tales of musical growth and awareness that might even usher in a broader popular renaissance in singing.
Much praise has been heaped on Timothée Chalamet’s performance in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. Impressive indeed was the actor’s dedication to the task of learning to play the guitar and also to discovering his own singing voice in the process of doggedly modeling it on Bob Dylan’s. Both the accuracy of Chalamet’s vocal imitation of his model and his assiduity in attaining a convincing musical competency have been universally applauded. This particular set of talents had remained undeveloped by Chalamet until he undertook the project of becoming Bob on screen. The Bard himself even seems to have offered laconic, though still obscure, approval of his screen epigone’s efforts.
Those watching Chalamet do Dylan might now be encouraged to pick up a guitar on eBay or at the local Salvation Army Store, download a chord chart or the relevant apps, and get bardic themselves. It was this ethos of possibility that fueled the post-war folk revival and, thanks to Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, might just spawn a Second Great Awakening of Song.
Though some might be daunted, even discouraged by Chalamet’s apparently nonchalant ascent to the summit of songdom, anyone really can become a serviceable, guitar-wielding folksinger performing for the pleasure of self, family and friends. Learning just a couple-three chords, and with them opening up endless vistas onto myriad tunes and lyrics, is the work of hours.
To become an opera singer is, by contrast, a Herculean labor of years and even decades. In Pablo Larraín’s Callas (now streaming on Netflix), screen diva Angelina Jolie portrays the opera diva in her last week in Paris, moving through, and remaining still, in a world of aural and visual illusion, wandering through a labyrinth of memory and fantasy, ecstatic song and vocal failure.
In contrast to Chalamet’s unalloyed voice, Angelina Jolie’s ventriloquizes Callas’s with the aid of digital magic that artfully melds her singing voice with that of the exalted diva’s. The result is a pleasing mix of the two, a vocal fabrication that persuasively emerges from her speaking voice.
Where Chalamet had been at his Dylan musical studies for five years before shooting the movie, Jolie did a scant seven months of “intensive” vocal work in advance of Callas. Much of her tuition involved learning proper pronunciation and shaping the mouth properly in the various languages sung—Italian, French and German. Breath support and vocal production were also crucial to making her look believable on screen. Jolie was not an operagoer nor had ever sung in public before she embarked on the title role in Callas.
Jolie could never come as close to Callas’s sound as Chalamet gets to Dylan’s. Still, she has become an ardent convert and proselytizer. Famous arias now dominate her personal playlist and in many promotional interviews for the movie she has extolled the benefits of singing.
Last week she told ClassicFM that singing had transformed her in mind and body: “To be forced to get past that and make a full sound again was almost like shaking me out from years of holding, and having to confront and release a lot. It was really a gift. It’s very freeing. That’s why I say everybody should do it. I’m encouraging everyone [to learn to sing].”
Callas is as much about the body as the voice, which are, after all inseparable, even if the latter escapes the former in its journey to the ears of others. Callas’s extreme battles with her weight are obliquely portrayed in the movie when she hides pills in the pockets of the many sumptuous garments hanging in her vast wardrobe which are discovered, then confiscated, by her fondly severe butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri (Francesco Favino). The film depicts her fitful attempts at a comeback, following her to rehearsals in an empty theater where she is accompanied by her repetiteur (Steven Ashfield) at the piano. On the stage of the empty hall her voice has shrunk like her emaciated frame.
In a conversation with the film’s director Pablo Larraín hosted by Vogue, the Callas director begins by asking the actor if she is going “to open up a center” —Jolie responds with advice that must have echoed from the Hollywood Hills across the LA Basin and throughout the movie industry: “Skip therapy for a year and just go to opera class.”
The bodies of celebrity women have long been toned and tended to, modified and mocked, tailored for objectification on screen and red carpet, the fodder for tabloids and fanchat. But the voice has been neglected, and good on Jolie for bringing awareness to it.
But Larraín’s conjuring of a center immediately makes one wonder whether the current fitness trends, from spinning to rucking to hot Pilates, will now be complemented by vocal calisthenics. Will Muscle Beach become the site of weekly concerts with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the well-oiled Barbell Choristers, blasting the Anvil Chorus out over the Pacific? Will home gyms from sea-to-shining-sea and across the smoldering plain be retrofitted as music rooms a la Jane Austen?
Canny capitalists must now be mobilizing in order to profit from what could be a huge new craze in self-improvement—monetizing the singing voice, that echo from our species’ distant past when melody and human language were born together—or so the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined.
An idealist might hope that these movies and the uplifting pronouncements of their stars will lead not to exploitation but to an explosion of choral singing and of individual expression—even to political revolution.
But these movies reject community, lauding Dylan for lifting the middle finger to the people and spirit of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and sympathizing with Callas as she collapses into herself and her own legend.
There is nothing new under the ever-hotter sun. Back in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the towering Elizabethan musician William Byrd answered his own rhetorical question about the value of singing with eight airtight reasons that hit on all of Jolie’s, including pronunciation, circulation and breath, and mental health (in this case the proper worship). Let the world take this musical titan’s advice to heart, even as we await a Byrd biopic and the Psalmes, Sonet, & songs app:
Why Learne to Sing?
Reasons briefly set down by th’author, to perswade every one to learne to sing.
First, it is a knowledge safely taught and quickly learned, where
there is a good Master, and an apt Scholler.2 The exercise of singing is delightfull to Nature, & good
to preserve the health of Man.3 It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, & doth open the pipes.
4 It is a singular good remedie for a stutting and stamering in the
speech.5 It is the best means to procure a perfect pronounciation, & to
make a good Orator.6 It is the onely way to know where Nature hath bestowed the
benefit of a good voyce : which guift is so rare, as there is not one
among a thousand, that hath it.7 There is not any Musicke of Instruments whatsoever, comparable
to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voyces are
good, and the same well sorted and ordered.8 The better the voyce is, the meeter it is to honour and serve
God there-with : and the voyce of man is chiefely to bee imployed
to that ende.“Omnis Spiritus Laudes Dominum”
Since Singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learn to sing.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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