Thoughts on Brett Morgan’s documentary, “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.”
I attended a screening of the film at SXSW, and while I really wanted to like it, I felt that it raised more question about Kurt Cobain and his legacy than it answered. Foremost of which are — Why exactly did Kurt become such an icon, when he was so poorly suited for the position, and so plainly didn’t want to be anyone’s role model? Was our country’s self-esteem at such a low point in the late 80’s and early 90’s that it needed to make a self-hating drug addict a spokesman for the nation’s youth? Why, if he was so deeply alienated from almost everyone around him, did he hanker for the trappings of conventional family life? Did Courtney Love try to save him or did she provoke his suicide? How credible are we supposed to find her in the film? Where was Dave Grohl? Where was the grown up Francis Bean?
What the film is sorely lacking is narrative context. If not an actual narrator, then a narrative intelligence needed to be positioned between the footage and the interviews on screen, and the audience trying to make sense of them. Brett Morgan does great things with animation in the film, and Kurt’s notebooks are used in inventive ways (though the final entry, the suicide note, is strangely absent), but he sorely neglects interpretation. The music is magnificent, and the concert footage is superb, but the film leaves you with a queasy voyeuristic feeling (did I really want to see that much of Courtney naked?) that may or may not have been the filmmaker’s intention.
