How Princess Diana fell under the spell of flirty Pavarotti
Pavarotti (12A) Verdict: Reverential documentary ★★★✩✩ Armstrong (PG) Verdict: Another high flier ★★★✩✩ THe best documentaries about iconic figures are usually those which reveal our idols to have feet of clay, showing their all-too-human frailties as well as their virtues.
A pair of documentaries this week, about two very different men, one with an extraordinary talent, the other with an extraordinary story, do not really abide by that rule.
Luciano Pavarotti and neil Armstrong emerge from these films with their legends enhanced, not diminished.
But neither documentary suffers from this slight tilt towards hagiography. They’re both hugely watchable, especially Ron Howard’s Pavarotti, which presents the great operatic tenor as a giant not just in terms of his talent and girth, but also in terms of charm, presence and genuine goodness. His humanitarian work was as prodigious as his appetite.
if your memories stretch back beyond July 1990, then try to recall a time before the Three Tenors concert in Rome, on the eve of the football World Cup Final, turned Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras into classical music’s ultimate boyband.
Back then, there were plenty of us who might have mistaken
Nessun Dorma for a Japanese camper van.
Pavarotti changed all that. The former elementary school teacher from Modena wasn’t opera’s first global, male superstar; his own idol Enrico Caruso carried that distinction. But he was the first in the age of television, and relentlessly fanned the flames of his own celebrity.
Howard, whose last music documentary focused on another cultural phenomenon, The Beatles, shows us how. The genius of Pavarotti — apart from the remarkable voice, and those freakish high Cs — lay in the way he bent popular culture to his will.
It was a heck of a life and Howard traces it reverently. Nobody really has a bad word to say about Pavarotti, not even his first wife, Adua, to whom, in his most glaring example of human frailty, he was rather less than faithful.
He had a long affair with an American soprano (she pops up too), then married his adoring assistant Nicoletta Mantovani, 34 years his junior, who introduced the screening I attended.
Another woman to fall for him was Princess Diana; there are some delightful clips of them flirting, in a film that celebrates the two things about him that were unsurpassable; his charisma and his voice.
NEIL ARMSTRONG was practically the antithesis of Pavarotti; a reserved fellow who hated the celebrity that came with being the first astronaut to step on the moon 50 years ago next week. ‘Thank God social media didn’t exist back then,’ says his older son Rick, and Amen to that.
Nonetheless, director David Fairhead, in telling the story of ‘the man, not the mission’, has unearthed plenty of insightful material, and wisely hired Harrison Ford to speak Armstrong’s own words, giving them the gravitas that in his own slightly reedy, hesitant voice, they might not have carried.
Armstrong always felt the moon landing was such a collaborative effort that he didn’t deserve to be singled out for praise or attention.
In Shakespeare’s phrase, he had greatness thrust upon him. But this enjoyable, if workaday, documentary leaves us in no doubt that his, too, was a remarkable life.