Pretentious ‘Blue Like Jazz’ Can’t Find the Right Groove

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Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz” is a beloved book that spent 43 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over 1.5 million copies. I haven’t read it. But I have to believe that it worked on its fans in a way that Steve Taylor’s film simply cannot. This is clearly a personal story, one that touched people by relating to issues they’ve grappled with in their own lives. By taking Taylor’s memories and turning them into cinema, the ability to touch has been removed another degree of separation and the resulting film is a misstep, the kind of work that thinks it’s saying something important but feels more pretentious than precious.

Marshall Allman (“True Blood”) plays Don, the film’s central character and its biggest problem. Don is intended to be a young man on a journey of self-discovery but he becomes – through performance and screenwriting – nothing more than a device. He’s the window into the world of religion followed by one into the world of a liberal arts education and he never becomes real to us. Even worse, the reflections of “religion vs. education” have been boiled to their basic ingredients. It’s a film that keeps expressing its desire to shatter myths about stereotypes related to religious Texans and the heathens of the great Northwest through its mouthpieces and yet it fully embraces them at the same time through its storytelling. In the end, Taylor takes complex, daring themes and makes them feel safe and simple. It’s clearly something that worked better on the page.

Blue Like Jazz
Photo credit: Sony Pictures

Don grew up a devout Southern Baptist in Texas but his world is shattered after he discovers that his mother has been sleeping with the married youth pastor. The idea that Don’s discovery that even pious people can commit sins would push him so far to the other side that he’s quickly drinking, pranking, and hiding his upbringing is one of the film’s greatest flaws. We never really see Don struggle with this decision in the way we need to for his journey to work. If Don’s journey feels forced by storytelling instead of character right from the beginning it never has a chance to work.

Don runs away from his religious upbringing to Reed College in Portland, a progressive campus that never feels genuine. The minute that Don gets there, people are acting wacky in ways that they only do in film (trust me, I went to a progressive, small college). College is, by its very nature, a time of exaggeration – a time when you can get wasted, fall in love, and think you’ve figured out your purpose in the world, all in one weekend. And yet when we see these issues crammed into a film like “Blue Like Jazz,” they don’t feel genuine. Everything about the world of Reed College from the character who dresses up like a bear to the one who plays The Pope to the pretty girl who Don will surely fall for to the heartbroken lesbian is a cliché. And they’re the worst kind of cliché because their creator thinks they’re real. The world of “Blue Like Jazz” doesn’t work if the characters feel like archetypes instead of genuine ones and yet that’s exactly what happens here.

Blue Like Jazz
Photo credit: Sony Pictures

To be blunt, I just didn’t buy “Blue Like Jazz,” especially the tidy, neat resolution in which our lead basically sums up what he’s learned at college. Perhaps a story like “Blue Like Jazz,” about a young man grappling with very complex issues related to faith and family, can’t be conveyed in 100 minutes. I believe everyone came into this with the best of intentions and I wish more films were willing to tackle issues of religion, faith, and an educational world in which they are often undervalued, but the complexities of these issues for most of us are too deep for a film this shallow. It’s not this easy. In real life, it’s more gray than blue.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com