Walk Hard: the Review

Happy New Year! This week, I’m posting a review—the software testing is going slow with all the holiday distractions, but I hope to have enough done to post some results next week.

Mullet and I saw Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story this weekend. It likely won’t stay in the theatres that long as it failed to make the top 10 box office list, which is sad.
The movie itself is a really good parody of the music-related bio-pics that have come out in recent years, particularly the Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line, along with a swipe or two at the Ray Charles bio Ray. Walk Hard also references Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson, as well as portraying The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.

I thought about my favourite comedic music-related movie, This is Spinal Tap, afterwards, and I realized that there was something missing. Don’t get me wrong--Walk Hard is funny (the punk song, the Beatles, and the angel-dust freakout being my favourite scenes), but it wasn’t a great comedy like Spinal Tap is.

Webster’s online dictionary defines parody as:

a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule..

It also defines satire as:

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly

The difference, for me, between Spinal Tap and Walk Hard is that Spinal Tap is a satire of the then-dominant heavy metal/hard rock segment of rock music in the 1980’s, and Walk Hard is a parody of musical biographies. Spinal Tap shows a heavy metal band on the brink of extinction, with interal dissent, led by their slighty-smarter manager, through a North American tour in support of an album that few outside the band seem to want to hear. Gigs are cancelled or changed to smaller venues, the set list changes to older material, and the manager eventually leaves in favour of the lead singer’s girlfriend. Only a place on the Japanese charts and a subsequent tour keeps them together in the end. Throughout the movie, the music business is ridiculed by showing a rotating cast of record company personnel, promoters, radio, and retailers spark, mismanage, or barely survive mishap after mishap. The band’s personalities collide frequently, with large egos battered and bruised as they take 2nd place to a puppet show and end up at an Air Force dance. Spinal Tap is not a parody of anything else other than rock documentaries of life on the road, but as a satire it shows no mercy.

Walk Hard, on the other hand, mocks not the subject of the musical bios but the bios themselves. It mocks the plot and characters of Walk the Line most of the time, but breaks it up with parodies of Brian Wilson’s wall-of-sound 60’s burnout, Dylan’s wordplay, the Beatles’ trip to India, and even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. You could argue that Walk Hard holds up human vices and follies to ridicule (Dewey’s drug addictions, multiple wives and children, etc), but when the movie does so it is lifting something from Walk the Line and exaggerating it for comedic effect.

The poster itself parodies The Doors original poster and DVD artwork, but, alas, there is no walk in the desert for Dewey, nor do we get a chance to see him confront the rise and fall of disco, punk (aside from a drug-fuelled romp through his biggest hit), New Wave, hair metal, boy bands, etc., etc. A satire certainly would have done so, but the parody has to follow the path of its target, so we skip from the 70’s to the 90’s via a hilarious transition device that I’m not going to spoil here.

Parodies have returned with a vengeance the last few years (Epic Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie, etc., etc.), but there have been very few satires by comparison. Scream satirized the horror genre, and itself was parodied by Scary Movie. Walk Hard avoids the gag a minute frenzy of those movies (and the earlier parodies like Airplane! and the Naked Gun series). This, however, seemed to confuse some of the audience we were part of—a few walked hard for the exits, actually. Knowing the sources of parody helped, to be sure, but these people were not in the mood to sit and wait for the jokes.

There are some great comedic performances in Walk Hard. John C. Reilly, a great character actor in both dramas and comedies, proves he can carry a movie (and sing). Jenna Fischer is also great in this as the femme slightly-fatale, as is Tim Meadows as Dewey’s longtime drummer. The four men playing the Beatles steal their scene effortlessly, as does Jack White as a knife-packing young Elvis Presley.

Go see movie. It’s better than recent parodies, but it’s not on the level of a Spinal Tap.