THE MYSTERY OF MICHAEL HUTCHENCE
Last month, Fathom Events presented a one-night screening of the restored INXS concert documentary, “Live Baby Live,” and it caught a band at the peak of its pop powers: playing for more than 70,000 people at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1991.
This month, Fathom is presenting what could be considered a somber bookend to that joyous celebration. “Mystify: Michael Hutchence,” screening Tuesday at theaters across the country, goes behind the music to try and get at what drove — and ultimately destroyed — lead singer Michael Hutchence, who committed suicide by hanging in November 1997.
Directed by Australian video music director Richard Lowenstein — who crafted videos for INXS as well as U2, Pete Townshend, Crowded House and Big Country — “Mystify” literally keeps the focus squarely on Hutchence. While former girlfriends, members of his family, bandmates, producers and former managers act as guides through his sometimes difficult life, they never appear on screen except in archival footage when they were with Hutchence.
The result is like flipping through a Michael Hutchence scrapbook that happens to have narration from the people closest to him, ranging from Bono to singer and ex-girlfriend Kylie Minogue. Much of the homemovie footage and many of the family photos — some of which Hutchence shot himself, ranging from his earliest years to not long before his death — feel almost intrusive in their casual intimacy.
Yet though “Mystify” often shows Hutchence at his most jubilant and carefree, it also captures a darker, more brooding side rooted in early insecurities and family dysfunction — when his parents split, he was separated from his brother, Rhett — that didn’t evaporate because of a couple of bestselling albums and a string of hit singles. Things only got worse after he suffered brain injuries resulting from a violent 1992 encounter with a taxi driver that left the singer unconscious in the street with blood coming from his mouth and ear, recalls model Helena Christensen, a
Shout Factory
former girlfriend.
Everyone involved says things spiraled downward after that blow, one that left him without the ability to taste or smell. He was often angry — one day smashing a favorite guitar of INXS keyboardist/guitarist Andrew Farriss just for the heck of it — and “seemed to crave more danger in his life,” says Andrew’s brother, Tim, who also played guitar in the band.
“Mystify” documents what others suspected by showing the autopsy that revealed major areas of brain damage.
When combined with his involvement in the nasty Bob Geldof-Paula Yates custody feud (he was dating Yates after she broke up with Geldof), INXS’ commercial slide (though he was friends with Bono, he seemed to envy U2’s status as serious artists who could also sell a ton of albums while INXS were considered a more disposable pop band), and a flirtation with grunge (something that the rest of the band resisted), it seemed that INXS — a project he had devoted 20 years of his life to — probably had reached the end of its shelf life by the late ’90s.
But whether all of that, coupled with booze and drugs, or something else, such as depression, pushed him over the edge is not answered definitely in Lowenstein’s film. Instead, “Mystify” artfully colors in the details of what remains a sad mystery.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE AND KYLIE MINOGUE ARE FEATURED IN THE DOCUMENTARY “MYSTIFY: MICHAEL HUTCHENCE.”