Mini-Review: "Joy Division"
March 1, 2008
A lot has been said about Joy Division in the past 12 months — a well-earned comeback year for a band that last left a studio in 1980. The aspect most often missed, and the delicate focus of Grant Gee’s “Joy Division,” is what the band has to say. Buried in an ornate overlay of personal interviews over Mancunian landscape scenes is the idea, via Gee, that Joy Division revolutionized a genre on accident and a city on purpose — and theirs was the soundtrack to the entire glorious uproar.
The message here, unlike Anton Corbijn’s tortured soul approach to frontman Ian Curtis, is that Joy Division is best understood in how the band changed the murky Mancunian suburbs that provided the fodder for its two albums. While “Control” spent most of its screen time exposing Curtis’ demons, “Joy Division”’s focus spans the three years the band did: Joy Divison’s entire career — its beginning as Warsaw, its transition to Factory Records, Curtis’s spasmodic dancing, Tony Wilson’s antics — tied up as its unabashedly complicated nature would have to be, in 96 minutes of the band’s darkly melancholy melodies.
“Joy Division” is a movie for the fans, with a tone somewhere between the ironic humor of “24 Hour Party People” and the overwhelming moodiness of “Control.” The plot’s balance teeters between interviews from all the scene’s key players, including all three remaining JD members, and footage of old Manchester hotspots Gee chose to label “Things That are Not There.” The effect is strongest when spliced in with comparison footage of the city as it is now.
Much of the interviews focus on topics it seems either too soon or too late to talk about, but to Gee’s credit, nothing is left out of his beautifully organized memoir. The intent goes beyond the idea that JD was “something special” to create an imposing approximation of the United Kingdom’s reaction to the unlikely pop band’s even more unlikely success story. Coupled with Gee’s innate ability to match sound with story, the message is flawless.
The film’s most telling quote lies in JD guitarist Bernard Sumner’s distinction that while most bands could say “Fuck you,” Joy Division said, “We’re fucked.” Though he never editorializes, Gee manages to reinforce the debt Manchester owes to one of its greatest bands while simultaneously hinting that it’s more than can be repaid.
Gee’s concept in “Joy Division” is not as much a typical scrapbook documentary as it is a careful observance of the ways the band, as a whole, influenced a burgeoning music scene. The closing credits, layered over Joy Division’s “Atmosphere,” include no small amount of Mancunian legends that, in a year that saw two films commemorating the band, push Gee’s rock doc to a candid, touching frontline “Control” often reached through fiction. This is the band’s subconscious story, pure and simple, perhaps too little, certainly too late, but in all other respects—perfect.
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