Searching for the Appeal of Baker, ‘Let’s Get Lost’

Bob Epstein, the respected film and jazz historian and program host at KLON in Long Beach, has written to inquire rather sharply why Calendar ran not one but two devastatingly negative reviews of Bruce Weber’s documentary about Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost.”

The answer is that the film seemed to call, as some others do, for two kinds of expertise. It is a work of the film makers’ art; it is also the biography of an important jazz figure. The reviews by Times film critic Sheila Benson and Times jazz critic Leonard Feather were, naturally, written independently, and the score could have been 2-0 in favor of the film, a split decision, or 0-2 against. It proved to be the last. Did it ever.

Other critics have praised the film lavishly. “Let’s Get Lost” obviously divides viewers, which if nothing else is the mark of a strongly provocative work. My own response was largely negative, I confess, but rather than drive a third nail into Weber’s film, let me speculate on why it draws such contrasting reactions.

I’ve often thought that films, both factual and fictional, can affect viewers so strongly that the contents override even positive assessments of the form. It’s the ancient tendency to want to kill the messenger who has arrived bearing bad news.

Whatever his skills as a trumpet player, Chet Baker was a pathetic figure, the unutterably, boyishly handsome young player who looked like a recent graduate of “Leave It to Beaver” but who ended up as a hollow-cheeked, toothless, mumbling, all but brain-dead relic.

Weber, crosscutting between then and now, accentuates this decline and fall, this syncopated rake’s progress, because it is the bitter and inescapable fact of Baker’s life. It is said to be true, and may well be, that the film was begun in affection and admiration, along with what surely was a morbid fascination.

The trouble is that Baker is dismaying and uncomfortable to contemplate. He is the boy wonder gone awry. The film is no doubt a cautionary tale about drug abuse, although the last thing “Let’s Get Lost” is is preachy.

The fact is that it is an angering film to watch. The skills of compilation, investigation and editing together are quite fine. It is just that there is no evidence offered--if in fact there was any--that Baker made any serious effort to kick his habit. He appears to have surrendered to it with an astonishing lack of will. The consequences are horrifying, and they undercut the cautionary aspects of the film because the clear message is, You can’t fight it; don’t bother.

As I watched the film, I kept thinking of a lakeside amusement park near home which, when I was very young, had a chained bear who lived in fenced enclosure, with a large piece of drainage pipe set in the hillside for his hibernations. He was thin and threadbare and lived mostly on the bottles of pop which tourists threw him and which he could catch, de-cap and chugalug. The diet did him no good whatever and, one year when we arrived for the annual school picnic, he was gone, dead of the sport we all had with him.

In the subjective style of later documentaries--a world away from the didactic certainties of the March of Time, for example--”Let’s Get Lost” tries with considerable success to catch the feeling of Baker’s world: the larky and kaleidoscopic confusions of lights and movement and boon companions and the sweet doing of nothing when you have the spurious feeling the high will last forever.

It never does, and “Let’s Get Lost” leaves no doubt that it never does. It is just that, in viewing the remains of a promising young talent who seemed to have the world before him, Weber makes us all voyeurs--forcing us to look not only upon the wasted Baker but into the dark dangers of our own lives. This is instructive but unsettling, and it may reflect a miscalculation by Weber on the impact his film would have.

It is not a tribute but a sorry requiem.