Teaming up once again with director Andrew Dominik (and I mean in front of the camera, since he also contributed to Dominik’s… interesting Marilyn Monroe biopic), This Much I Know To Be True serves as a follow-up to the 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling. Where that film captured Cave at his most outwardly melancholic, wrestling with his grief over the death of his son, this shows him in a much better place.
Granted, this is a better place as seen through Cave’s morbid perspective and sense of humour. The film opens with him admitting that he’s been training as a ceramicist because “it’s no longer viable to be a touring artist”, showing a collection of pieces that tell the story of the Devil, from "awakening" to death. When it gets to him displaying “The Devil Who Kills His First Child”, the camera initially stays fixed on Cave as he explains this part of the story, as if daring to linger on the art’s image would only serve to confirm a terrible truth. Or, at least, a terrible and quite natural feeling that can come from a parent outliving their own child. But when it gets to “The Devil Forgiven”, there is no such apprehension, from the camera or from Cave. Whatever feelings he may have harboured, he seems to have made peace with them.
This shows through in the music he’s created since OMTWF as well, as this kinda-sorta serves as a performance rehearsal put to film, with Cave and Warren Ellis performing music off of The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album Ghosteen and Cave and Ellis’ own collaborative work Carnage. Continuing Cave’s late-period attraction to ambience and post-rock electronics, the lyrics are as abstract as ever… and yet they all tell the same story. Images of death, of mourning, of parents separated from their young, but framed with the understanding that the pale rider comes for everyone in the end. It takes the jocular slyness of Cave ending his Murder Ballads album with a cover of Bob Dylan’s Death Is Not The End, but it’s entirely earnest this time around. Once again, a showing that he has made peace with what has happened, and will happen to him eventually.
Dominik’s film craft in showing these rehearsals is fucking incredible across the board, managing to boost what are already powerful and resonating songs into the kind of alchemical power that got me seriously noticing Nick Cave in 20,000 Days On Earth. Dominik and DP Robbie Ryan’s camera circles the performers, rolling and rotating around them while the lighting arrangements… I mean, I can’t even remember the last time I specifically brought up the lighting in a movie; that should be a sign of just how stand-out that aspect is here. Washing over Cave, Ellis, and their backup singers, shifting from a spotlight, to flashes perfectly timed to piano notes, to a flood that encompasses the entire screen in brightness. That newfound optimism as visual aesthetic.
But not only has Cave come to terms with mortality, he’s also made some headway as far as how he approaches the process of making art. In One More Time With Feeling, he portrayed himself as being hopelessly at the mercy of his need to create art, even when he was too close to his grief to get any catharsis out of it. But here, he talks of the mental effort he’s put into considering himself as a person first, rather than having his status as an artist be the most important thing in his life. He still has that drive, and from the sounds of it, that drive is still steering him in the right directions, but it’s not the be-all-end-all of his existence. In comparison to how many artists out there fetishise their own devotion to creating things beyond any of their other connections in life (and I’m just as guilty of playing into this), it makes for a refreshing and humbling moment.
And as just another person, I have to say that it makes me happy to see Nick Cave at this point in his life. That he still finds his struggles, but that he’s now in a place where he can deal with the grief that seemed to have him chained up emotionally last time. There are moments of levity to be found beyond that auteur connection, like in seeing Cave and Ellis describe each other’s creative approaches (not to mention the anxiety-riddled mess that is Warren Ellis’ desktop), but the visuals, the sounds, and especially Nick Cave himself, all radiate a sense of peace and hope and even joy. A proclamation that, in Cave’s own words, “In time, we all find out we are not in control. We never were. We never will be. But we are not without power.”
We hurt, we heal, we move forward. I reckon that’s as good a note as any to end the year with.
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