5 days ago
Bono: Stories of Surrender - Bono on his ownio on Broadway
As the man himself says, welcome to "a whole new level pf navel-gazing."
The film of the book tour of "the buke" he wrote himself swims into life in stark monochrome with Bono on the stage of the Beacon Theatre in New York. It's Bono on his ownio on Broadway with only a simple table and chairs and the Jackknife Lee Ensemble working their minimalistic magic behind him.
We're not in Vegas anymore.
For a man who often thinks bigger is beautiful, Bono: Stories of Surrender is a refreshingly intimate close up of a rock star flipping through his back pages and doing a very good job of charming the birds down from the gods and maybe even giving Bono haters pause for thought.
Across the short one and a half hours running time, the man behind the perma shades is very good company, spinning yarns, singing songs, and only occasionally lapsing into the Bono-sprech that makes him just that tiny bit naff and cringey - or a hate figure to many who see him as a hypocrite riddled with contradictions.
And nobody knows that better than Bono. He is half self-effacing preacher and half penitent, creeping to the cross. He does humility very well but this "over-lavished, over-praised, over-fed and over0paid rock star" is also more than willing to declare his right to be ridiculous.
The shaman and shameless showman admits that doing this "quarter man show" feels transgressive without his three band mates. They are represented here by those three chairs but there are few new insights into the inner workings and tensions of U2 in this film. All too often inter-band friction is explained away with more poetic slights of, well, Bono-sprech. You can almost here Larry muttering side of stage, "Fine, do the solo show - just keep me out of it."
There are pen portraits of Paul McGuinness ("the Winston Churchill of rock. He went to war for U2"), Bono's wife Alison (they married at only 21) and his bandmates ("When he loves, Larry loves completely") but the anchor of this show is Bono's voyage around his father, the late Bono Hewson.
When the singer's mother, Iris, died when Bono was just 14 after collapsing at her own father's funeral ("almost too Irish, I know"), Bob took a vow of angry silence and never mentioned her name again, turning the family home on Cedarwood Road into, as Bono says, "a river of silence in which I might have drowned."
"The Opera of Bon Hewson" brings us to the Sorrento Lounge of Finnegan's Pub in Dalkey where father and son held Sunday afternoon seances over Guinness (Bono) and Bushmills (Bob), barely speaking to each other, but cracks begin to emerge in Hewson Sr's resolute refusal to be impressed by his son's wild success.
When the lifelong opera fan accompanies his son to Pavarotti's hometown of Modena in Italy, he initially turns down an invitation to meet Lady Diana. However, when she comes up unannounced and introduces herself, Bob is charmed out of his patriotism. "800 years of oppression disappeared in eight seconds" says his still incredulous son.
So, this is a Bonologue that obeys all the conventions of a stage production but this being Bono, it is only a folk mass and a sermon. And this being Bono, there are also plenty of gnomic one-liners (Sunday Bloody Sunday is "religious art meets The Clash," with I Will Follow, The Edge turned my graffiti into some f***in' Rapheal Mother and Child"), and philosophical guff like "There's a selfishness implicit in the desire to be great at something."
The songs take on a new life. Cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty pick out the strident melody of Vertigo (a song about the vertiginous heights of U2's fame) and there are great snatches (arias, if you like) of Desire, Where The Streets Have No Name, With or Without You and the spine-tingling quasi religiosity of I Will Follow.
Shot in a clean lined but atmospheric black and white by director Andrew Dominik, it moves along at a brisk, playful pace and the fourth wall is shattered once or twice. An interval section goes meta with Bono staring for long seconds at his own reflection in a mirror and the film's closing scene takes us to (where else) Teatro San Carlo Napoli, with Bono singing - rather beautifully - the U2 track The Showman - another song about the strangeness of being Bono.
In the past few years, U2 have recorded albums full of childhood reveries and played a Vegas residency dedicated to their 1991 magus opus Achtung Baby. Solo Bono in particular has been busy with his own archaeology of The id but with the drumbeat of a new U2 album sounding again, maybe this film closes a chapter that was in danger of meandering on for far too long.
It's all played out in front of a wildly appreciative audience as only American audiences can be and Bono has them eating out of his often outstretched hand. Of course, whether you will enjoy this story of fate and faith as much as the folk in the Beacon Theatre all depends on whether you enjoy Bono but this is a very likeable, funny and moving night pf tales from a short rock star.
