Ada and the Jets

Rating: 6/10 (17 June 2019)

"And the wind said: 'Remember how we used to play?" Ada McGrath(Holly Hunter), a mute Englishwoman, signs to Flora(Anna Paquin), her daughter, on a far-flung beach in 19th century New Zealand. "Then the wind took her hand and said, 'Come, come with me,'" Ada continues, as they wait for her husband, an enterprising homesteader, inside her own crinoline that she refashioned as a makeshift tent. Flora is her collaborator; the mother and daughter form a partnership, in day-to-day life and in art. Ada scribbles prosaic things on a small notepad she keeps chained around her neck. Flora is her voice in the oral sense; she's the wordsmith. The daughter is a storyteller. She tells her stepfather's housekeeper that Ada, an Austrian opera singer, was married to a German composer. They were rehearsing in the drenched forest, oblivious to the downpouring, because "so passionate was their singing," according to Flora, that they didn't hear the thunder. "Mother never spoke another word," after father was struck down by lightning. Flora is lyrical. "The Piano", the 1993 Palm d'or-winning film by Jane Campion, has for a heroine, a piano woman whose music does all the talking. The daughter's stories are proto-lyrics, inspired by Ada's music, whereas in Dexter Fletcher's "Rocket Man", it's the musician, Elton John(Taron Egerton), whose compositions are sparked by Bernie Taupin(Jaime Bell), the 1992 Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee who would have poeticized Ada's hand gesturing into this: "And they whispered into your brain," a line from the 1974 song about Marilyn Monroe, the one with the chorus; "And it seems to me, you lived your life like a candle in the wind."
"Candle in the Wind" is from Elton John's seventh album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", the third single that somehow failed to chart, despite following the wild success of the title track, a number one hit; the songwriting team's third in a row. It's this song, the elegiac "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" that Taupin sings as he walks out of a restaurant after an attempt at reconciliation proves to be futile. "So goodbye yellow brick road/Where the dogs of society howl/You can't plant me in your penthouse/I'm going back to my plough," which are his words, not Elton's, even though "Rocket Man" treats them as if they were. For instance, "The ***** is Back" is staged at an AA meeting: "I was justified when I was five," he recounts to the other recovering alcoholics, in what turns out to be the film's prologue, because Eggerton passes off his vocal duties to Sebastian Rich, while he watches his nine-year-old self(Matthew Illesley), back when he was Reginald Dwight, growing up in the lower-middle-class milieu of suburban Middlesex. Originally, the "*****" in question is probably John, but the film coopts Taupin's lyrics as code for his cold and distant father, Stanley(Steven McIntosh), a "*****" who is "back" from a business trip. Taupin must have undergone an identity crisis at one time or another. Quite tellingly, at the 1978 Science Fiction Awards, he introduces William Shatner's spoken word interpretation of "Rocket Man" as "MY rocket man," which not coincidentally, took place during the period when he and John took a break from their songwriting partnership, following the poorly received "Blue Moves"(1977). It's not hard to imagine that Bernie took a taxi straight from the USC campus straight to the meeting with his estranged partner right after Shatner was done. Neither man can admit that they need each other. At the awards ceremony, Taupin wanted the world to know that he played a key role in Elton John's ascension to superstardom. Very subtly, "Rocket Man" acknowledges the lyricist's hurt feelings of being underappreciated, since "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" makes reference to Victor Fleming's "The Wizard of Oz". Elton may be the "Pinball Wizard", but if you were to pull back the curtain, there would stand Bernie, writing his resignation letter: "Maybe you'll get a replacement/There's plenty like me to be found/Mongrels who ain't got a penny/Sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground." Elton John, in a sense, left Oz, too, and recorded two Taupin-less albums: "A Single Man"(1978) and the disco-inflected "Victim of Love"(1979), both panned, especially the latter. The "Pinball Wizard", as it turns out, was an amalgamation. Elton found himself back in Kansas, so to speak. "Oh, I've finally decided where my future lies/Beyond the yellow brick road." Six years after the platinum-selling, thirty times over "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", Taupin's words smacked of prophecy.
Music is a language. Ada's husband Alistair(Sam Neill), the unofficial king of Auckland, doesn't understand or doesn't care that the piano is his newlywed's voice. The colonized Maoris, who make up his convoy, haul everything but the piano, her primary form of self-expression, back to the village. The other white man, Baines(Harvey Keitel), adorned with tribal face tattoos, because he ingratiated himself within this tribe of indigenous New Zealanders, agrees to reunite Ada with her instrument.They reach the beach. The mother plays; the daughter dances. Flora is her muse. Together, they form a creative team to be reckoned with. Ada's composition suggests this couplet: "Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand," as she performs for her small audience along the shoreline. Flora cartwheels; her dancing is lyrical, expressing the interconnectedness between mother and child: "And now she's in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand." But times being what they are, the mid-19th century, the two "girls" can't escape the tyranny of men. Baines, opportunistic and libidinous, is like a proto-groupie. The two men barter. Baines obtains the piano. He wants to sleep with a musician. Alistair, similar to Elton John's manager John Reid(Richard Madden), drives a wedge between the fertile tandem. Across centuries, therein lies two men who don't love properly; both musicians are treated like property. With John, it's the money that he makes for his manager/lover, and as for Ada, it's the love that she makes; lovemaking as an act of slavery, resulting in either a child and marital love(Alistair), or a lovechild and romantic love(Bailey). Platonic relationships, in both instances: parent/child and musician/poet are severed, resulting in a lost finger for Aida and the lost potentiality of hit songs for John/Taupin, in due part to the machinations of scoundrels.
Ada sides with the Maoris; her piano is too heavy for the canoe. They're right. The canoe's progress to England will increase exponentially without the ballast of the cumbersome instrument. It's time for a proper Viking funeral. But what is the Victorian woman thinking? The pianist plants her foot in the center of the looped rope, so when the piano is given the heave-ho, the woman follows; woman overboard. Ada's kindred spirit of sorts, Elton John, likewise, attempts suicide by submerging himself in water, too, albeit, on a smaller scale, a swimming pool. Unexpectedly, John's drowning is the visual cue for "Rocket Man", in which the singer-songwriter sees his child-self seated at a tiny piano on the pool's bottom. Taupin describes a patriarchal world when he writes: "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids," if you prescribe to the notion that Mars is "masculine" and Venus is "feminine". Ada knows this first-hand, that it's "in fact...cold as hell," despite the temperate climate of the tropical rainforest in Karekare. The piano, for Ada, is ruined, like her left hand; the missing finger, she thinks, will impede her ability to play. On one of the white piano keys, Ada had inscribed: "Dear George, you have my heart," but her identity is tied to that piano, maimed like her, which would be fine if being some man's wife outweighed the sensation of accomplishment and self-worth she gets as a musical composer; an artist. Taupin's words: "And there's no one to raise them if you did," uncannily doubles as the mother's mind voice, remembering Ada does, that Flora would be left alone to explicate Mars' compositional subtext, Venus, without the music of a mother's maternal love as a guide. She frees her foot from the loop, inspired by the idea that being a parent is enough reason to live. Elton John's suicide attempt can be explained from a different section of "Rocket Man": "And I'm going to be high as a kite by then." If John died in 1975, "burning out his fuse up here alone," he would have missed out on meeting his two sons. Speaking in strictly platonic and also, songwriting partnership terms, Bernie Taupin may have birthed "Rocket Man", but he was not a hands-on mother; Taupin was just the lyricist. Elton John fulfilled two roles, the father and surrogate mother; that's what conscientious composers do. The two men were never in the same room for any of their collaborations. John worked alone. Bernie wrote the lyrics, and literally mailed it in.
"Tiny Dancer" is a queenly song. It's the working heart in "Almost Famous", Cameron Crowe's autobiographical films about his time as a cub reporter for "Rolling Stone" magazine. Everybody remembers the singalong on the tour bus that breaks the tension between Russell Hammond(Billy Crudup) and his Stillwater bandmates, who resent the lead guitarist's perception that he's "a golden god". Penny Lane(Kate Hudson), the self-described "band-aid", as everybody knows, is the "blue jean baby" with the "pirate smile". What people forget is that Crowe used a second Elton John song, "Mona Lisa & Mad Hatters", an album track from the 1972 album "***** Chateau". William Miller(Patrick Fugit) loves Penny. The song plays over his mad search for her in the dense streets of New York City, peering into taxi cabs, going out of his mind.
"And I thank the lord for the people I have found," writes Taupin, sings John, and resides in William's soul, when the paramedics pump the quaaludes out of her system in a lonely hotel room bathtub.