The man, the myth and the musician — all aiming high
MUSICAL TALE: Documentary looks at two differently driven artists
In 1976, near the end of the Evel Knievel era, Montreal-born stuntman Ken Carter planned to jump a mile across the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental.
The stunt did not go exactly as planned, but it helped put Carter in the history books; even today there is a Ken Carter Preservation Society — with archives! And it inspired Vancouver double bassist Mark Haney to compose his 2010 suite Aim for the Roses. The title comes from Carter’s remark that a flower bed was a better place to land than amid trees.
Director John Bolton splits time in this documentary between the story of Carter’s big jump and the tale of Haney’s opus. Each story is fascinating in its own way.
The jump uses archival footage and interviews, but also recreations, with Andrew McNee performing the part of Carter, and Raphael Kepinski showing up in the role of Knievel, even if his song-and-dance routine make him look more like Elvis Knievel. The dramatizations are backed by Haney’s music, and we hear much of what drove him to produce a recording that coincided with (and perhaps even contributed to) the breakup of his marriage. “If there’s one thing that really sums up Aim for the Roses, it is putting far too much effort into minute details,” the musician says.
This included layering in a musical representation of the first 499 digits of pi, and including exactly one second of silence, positioned at the precise moment in the music to split its two halves into the so-called golden ratio; very roughly, 5 to 3.
The genius of the documentary is the way it manages not only to conflate the two tales (in one tongue-in-cheek instance with the help of a psychic) but to make each one worthy of our attention. I would gladly watch a full-length doc about Carter — the NFB made one in 1982, called The Devil at Your Heels and available online — or one about Haney.
But the double bass/daredevil mash-up — and the footage of Carter’s 450-metre runway and 10-storey, river-clearing takeoff ramp — makes for a beautiful, patriotic duet, and a sensitive look at two very differently driven artists.