Garth Jennings’s film about Pulp is warm and funny whenever it looks backwards, and Jarvis Cocker is good company throughout. When it reaches the O2 stage, where it ought to come alive, the cameras stand too far back to catch what the band is doing.
Garth Jennings, who made Son of Rambow (2007) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005), has made a film about Pulp that is half a concert film and half a biography, and the halves are not equally good. The biography is a pleasure: dry, unexpectedly tender, and steered almost entirely by Jarvis Cocker, who talks about his own past the way he sings about other people’s, fondly and with one eyebrow up. The concert, filmed at London’s O2, is where the film ought to catch fire and mostly does not. It runs 98 minutes, and it is a good evening for anyone who owned the records and a puzzling one for anyone who did not.
The story Jennings wants to tell is a plain one, and he is right to keep it plain. A tall boy in Sheffield decides he is going to be a pop star and keeps deciding it through years in which nothing happens and nobody comes. Eventually the country catches up. Jennings is good on stubbornness; his fiction films are full of people who believe in a thing long past the point of reason, and Cocker is that person in the flesh. The archive is the film’s best material. There is a great deal of it, and much of it comes from the years before anyone was filming Pulp on purpose.
The editors, Barney Pilling and Dylan Hansen-Fliedner, do the film’s real work. They cut the past against the present so that a face in a badly lit room turns, decades later, into the same face under stage lights, older and plainly happier. We were moved by that, more than we had bargained for, and we can say exactly why: the film does not comment on the gap, it simply puts one shot next to the other and lets us count the years. Cocker is at his best in interview in this stretch too, honest about how long the failure lasted and how odd the success felt when it arrived.
He is the film’s subject as well as its guide, and that is the first of its two problems. Candida Doyle, Nick Banks and Mark Webber are all here, on stage and in interview, and the film treats them mainly as witnesses to Cocker rather than as people with stories of their own. Doyle’s keyboards are as much the sound of Pulp as Cocker’s voice, and the film seems only mildly curious about her. It is his band, and the others seem content to say so, but a documentary about a band ought to have found more to ask them.
The second problem is the concert, and it is the one that matters more. The O2 footage is shot from a distance, wide and steady, so that the band are figures on a platform and the crowd is a dark mass at the bottom of the frame. What Pulp do live, on the evidence of every old clip in this same film, is close work: Cocker’s hands, Cocker’s knees, a lyric delivered to one person in the front row. The cameras at the O2 rarely get near enough to see any of it. We spent the big songs waiting for a cut that would put us on the stage, and it did not come. It is a strange failing in a film that has just spent an hour showing us, in grainy video from tiny rooms, how much of this band lives in the details.
Against the run of recent music documentaries, this is one of the better-made and better-tempered ones. It does not inflate its subject, it is funny on purpose, and Cocker is far better company than most frontmen handed a camera and 98 minutes. But the half that should have been its reason for existing is the weaker half.
See it if you loved them, with someone who did, and expect to be pleased for an hour and then slightly restless. If you have never heard a Pulp record, start with the records; the film assumes you already know why you are there.
