Byrne puts ‘meh’ in ‘American Utopia’
With theaters shuttered, televised spectacles will have to suffice. HBO presents “David Byrne’s American Utopia” (8 p.m. Saturday, TV-14), a filmed version of the hit Broadway production brought to the screen by director Spike Lee.
Like much of Byrne’s work, “Utopia” is thought-provoking even when it’s not exactly “fun.” And like too many of Lee’s efforts, “Utopia” manages to shoehorn some didactic sermonizing into the proceedings, a curious departure for Byrne, whose works have largely concerned art and not politics.
Still, the collaboration between the two artists raises interesting questions. When Byrne and his band the Talking Heads emerged in the late 1970s, they pointedly refused to be “rock” stars. Students from the Rhode Island School of Design, their look, their “act” and their lyrics reflected their status as college-educated white kids. Who else would cram high school French into a song about a “Psycho Killer”? Or muse that “Some civil servants are just like my loved ones”? They didn’t pretend to “sing the blues” or effect the kind of minstrelsy that had informed rock ‘n’ roll from its infancy.
In the early going, the Talking Heads could cover Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” and still manage to make it sound like some minimalist art project, complete with Byrne’s spastic shrieks.
Later, in the 1980s, when the Heads adopted a “world music”-inspired sound, they looted African polyrhythms with the gusto of anthropology students, a departure some found exciting, others more than a little forced.
For his part, Spike Lee has long meditated on black culture and its appropriation. His 2000 epic “Bamboozled” offers a brilliant if overlong take on contemporary minstrel culture.
Unfortunately, “Utopia” does not reflect the best of either artist. Known for his striking cinematography and rich color palette, Lee serves up something decidedly monochromatic here. I can’t believe this wasn’t presented in black and white. It’s gray anyway. Byrne has long straddled the line between clever and “too clever.” “Utopia”
tilts toward the latter, offering a jukebox filled with old favorites against the backdrop of an earnest TED Talk.
A critic smarter than me once slammed Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” as a musical written for the readers of The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. “David Byrne’s American Utopia” should be recycled as PBS pledgedrive programming. You deserve a tote bag just for watching.
› Small-town gossip looms large in the U.K. import “The Trouble With Maggie Cole” (8 p.m. Sunday, PBS, TV-14, check local listings). Dawn French (“French & Saunders”) stars in the title role, as the dowdy proprietor of a gift shop who fancies herself the local historian of a beautiful little town with legends dating back to medieval Britain.
“Trouble” begins when a slick London-based radio interviewer arrives for some dreary historical
anniversary. Bored with Maggie’s civic pride and predictable patter, he plies her with gin and fawning attention and gets her to gossip about her friends and neighbors.
The resulting broadcast is cringe-inducing for all concerned, particularly because some of her careless observations contain more than a whiff of truth.
Pleasant to look at and blessed with a game cast including Mark Heap, Julie Hesmondhalgh and up-and-comer Arthur McBain, “Maggie” is more than troubled by problematic pacing and tone.
It’s clearly aimed at fans of British shows set in similarly bucolic settings. The pilot’s buildup to Maggie’s mortification seems belabored, and its central “tragedy” of social embarrassment doesn’t quite measure up to the mass slaughter of “Midsomer Murders” or the near constant mutual contempt exhibited on “Doc Martin.”