20,000 Days on Earth Review

As genre lines become more blurred, we're often left to classify films as hybrids.  It's silly that we feel the need to categorize works of art (or forces of entertainment), but the human mind wants what it wants.  So we label one thing a rom-com/thriller and another as a horror/comedy, and feel a little bit abler to discuss complex films.

However, there's at least one generic distinction that is rarely challenged: the dividing line between documentary and narrative features.  Many documentaries employ actors to recreate events, but that's usually the extent of commingling.  A documentary is talking heads and facts and figures and reality presented with as much veracity as possible.  Narrative film, even when based on true events, cherry picks and reforms and rewrites.  Fact becomes fiction.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's 20,000 Days on Earth defies the distinction.  It's a curious film, impossible to categorize and challenging to grasp.  It's part documentary, part concert film, and part narrative feature, but even those disparate parts don't remain so; they ebb and flow into each other, creating a record that viewers must believe and embrace at their own risk.

I didn't know who Nick Cave was before watching 20,000 Days on Earth.  After watching it, I still barely know.  The film doesn't bother with any extended backstory or childhood photos.  What background we get comes from a lengthy conversation between Cave and a therapist, where he reflects on his upbringing and his parents, and we catch glimpses of what makes him tick.  But the film is akin to Cave's songs, lengthy narrative pieces that are often meandering and occasionally coherent.  The goal of this film isn't introduce viewers to Cave as a person, but to reveal his artistic soul.  And in that regard, it's a qualified success.

Cave, who also serves as a co-writer, narrates the film, with florid reminiscences and insights into the creative process.  The film's title comes from Cave reflecting on the length of his time on Earth, and he knows that time is of the essence.  "All our days are numbered.  We cannot afford to be idle.  To act on a bad idea is better than not to act at all," he says.  To admire Cave is easy, regardless of how one feels about his music (I'm not a fan of what I hear): his scribble-filled notebooks, his transformative stage presence, his deep connection to his craft all reveal a passionate creator, and a frustrated one.

The film is beautifully shot, which only adds to the confusion between what is reality and what is not.  There are no talking head interviews.  Rather, Cave occasionally shares his car with important people from his life, with whom he has "imaginary" discussions.  In these moments, the film is simultaneously at its most piercingly true, and its most carefully fabricated.  20,000 Days on Earth lets Cave present himself as he wants to be seen - he keeps the audience at a (figurative distance), speaking in carefully chosen words and metaphorically layered lyrics.  At the film's end, viewers barely know Cave any more than they would've had they read a magazine article about him.

But that's why the film is brilliant in its specific way.  This isn't Searching For Sugarman or 20 Feet From Stardom.  This isn't a documentary about the man behind the music: it's about the man within the music.  Cave is allowed to reveal himself carefully, partially, musically.  He intones that he controls the weather with his moods, but he can't control his moods.  However, he (and Forsyth and Pollard) can control how we perceive his moods, and 20,000 Days on Earth is a stroke of deceptive definition, and a more authentic representation of Cave's reality than a more standard documentary could be.