Anders Danielsen Lie (left) and Will Sach in 'Everybody Digs Bill Evans.' Courtesy of Shane O'Connor/Cowtown Pictures Limited/Hot Property Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment The seductive opening sequence of Everybody Digs Bill Evans draws you in like a magnet. The improvised jazz drifting through the air at the Village Vanguard in New York on a summer night in 1961 - soft, caressing, mellow, smoky - is one thing. But the extraordinary communion shared by the musicians of the Bill Evans Trio is what makes the sequence so memorable, concretizing what will later be described as "a perfect conversation" between them. Fingers skitter up and down the strings of a double bass, hands massage the piano keys, brushes gently scratch at the drums. It's hypnotic. Related Stories Movies Director Pablo Larraín Launches Pijama, Affordable Movie Rental Service to Help Fix the Distribution Business (Exclusive) Movies "The System That's Supposed to Protect You Becomes a Nightmare" - Juliette Binoche on 'Queen at Sea," Aging and Alzheimer's The five nights of the trio's Vanguard booking spawned two live recordings considered among the greatest jazz albums of all time. But it's not that significant moment in music history that is the scene's primary concern. What it establishes, more importantly, is the special connection between Evans (Anders Danielsen Lie), intensely focused on the keyboard, and Scott LaFaro (Will Sach), the handsome blond bassist beaming with pleasure across the small stage at him. Everybody Digs Bill Evans The Bottom Line Evocative and full of feeling. Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Bill Pullman, Laurie Metcalf, Barry Ward, Valene Kane, Katie McGrath, Will Sach, Boz Martin-Jones, Tallulah CavanaughDirector: Grant GeeScreenwriter: Mark O'Halloran, adapted from the novel Intermission, by Owen Martell 1 hour 42 minutes What director Grant Gee and his actors are showing us is uncommon musical empathy between two players, like witty conversationalists - talking at the same time, batting words back and forth, completing each other's sentences. Toward the end of the performance sequence, editor Adam Biskupski cuts between the Vanguard stage and 25-year-old LaFaro nodding off at the wheel of his car less than a month later. Only the briefest glimpses of the fatal automobile accident are shown, but the image of flames licking the double bass resting on the backseat of the car signals that the "perfect conversation," the alchemical interplay between two gifted musicians is finished. When Bill's older brother Henry (Barry Ward) finds the pianist in numbed solitude in his dingy apartment, Bill has canceled all his upcoming gigs, saying Scotty cannot be replaced. Nor can their connection be easily untangled. Mark O'Halloran's psychologically and emotionally perceptive screenplay, based on Owen Martell's semi-fictionalized novel, Intermission, never gets into specifics about the length of time the two musicians have known each other or the depth of their friendship. But in Lie's painfully internalized performance, it's almost as if Bill were mourning a lost lover. The months that followed LaFaro's death, in which Evans disappeared from public life, alternately feeding his heroin addiction or going cold turkey in an attempt to kick it, constitute the movie's principal timeline. Gee, a documentarian making an assured move into narrative features, punctuates the B&W scenes from 1961 with glimpses in color of Evans in the 1970s, when he had returned to performing, and in 1980, the year of his death. (A bad wig here and there is forgivable.) The film in no way resembles a cradle-to-grave bio-drama and yet the fragmented approach yields a multidimensional portrait of a complete life, once described by a friend of Evans as "the longest suicide in history." Reluctant to leave him alone, Henry insists Bill come to stay with him and his wife Pat (Katie McGrath), giving him time also with his adoring niece Debby (Tallulah Cavanaugh). Played with a bottomless well of kindness by the wonderful McGrath, Pat is genuinely concerned and loving with her brother-in-law but also worried about her husband, whose episodes - she describes him as schizophrenic, though in modern mental health terms he would likely be diagnosed with bipolar disorder - are getting worse. Henry moved his family to New York from Louisiana to find better opportunities as a music teacher. His envy of his brother's talent - something he never came close to, despite showing early promise - comes across less as sibling rivalry than bitter self-defeat. "It's not easy for ordinary people, you know," Henry tells Bill, an accusatory reminder to his brother that his artistry affords him privileges it would be irresponsible to throw away. Bill wan