Big Time

Here's another bit of "holy grail" cinema, long in my bloated queue.  Only home video release in the U.S. was on VHS.  Then one magic day I discovered it was streaming on Amazon Prime, perhaps coincidentally the next day airing on TCM.  1988's BIG TIME features singer/songwriter Tom Waits in concert, performing songs from his 1980s albums like Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs.  And as an usher (of sorts) and box office guy.  A huckster selling wristwatches.  A guy on a roof with an umbrella on fire.  Another guy on a restroom floor, pitching playing cards into a hat while muttering, "She loves me...she loves me not..." We first see him in a bed, watching television on New Year's Eve.  Do such scenes of "performance art" hurt the project? Are they entirely gratuitous? Turn Mr. Waits into some sort of cartoon?

Not for me.  Being familiar with Waits' eccentric turns in numerous motion pictures from the likes of (among others) Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and the Coen Brothers, I found these cuttaways to not be so much distracting or freakish but as part of his body of acting, outside of his stage personas.  The sequences are odd and borderline silly, something that would've been perfect for the old USA Network overnight show Night Flight.  Did this play on that? It should've.

By this time Tom Waits' patented gravelly voice was getting gravellier, and his music was incorporating more experimental elements.  There is free form jazz and rockabilly, and those beautiful, sad ballads. "Innocent When You Dream (Barroom)" and "Frank's Wild Years" were standouts here.  Fans of the T.V. program The Wire will be pleased with the inclusion of 'Way Down in the Hole."  Even those who can't take his voice have been crushed by his lived in lyrics, always truthful and devastating.  Observant, too.  During these shows filmed at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theater and in San Francisco, Waits charges the stage as lounge lizard and fedora bespotted poet at various times.  His music is unfailingly challenging and intriguing.  His stage presence in undeniable. The lighting design (in part supervised by Waits) is striking.

Fans of his older work who may have seen his earlier concerts may balk at this garish, of-its-time document.  I feel Chris Blum did a man's job as director of BIG TIME, framing this master showman in all his nimble nervousness, onstage and off.  There's really nothing else like it (or Mr. Waits).