Pieces of Dreams

By J.C.

JANIS

Directed by HOWARD ALK and SEATON FINDLAY

This is another film portrait of a musician. It is a different kind of music, however, and a very different life.

Janis Joplin, the subject of this willfully empty-headed documentary, died of an overdose of heroin in 1970 in a Hollywood motel room, all alone. There is no sense whatsoever in this film of the loneliness and desolation that could have led to such an end; indeed, there is no mention at all of her death, not even the fact of it. Instead, we are presented with a lot of concert footage and some spliced-in interviews, mostly gath ered from old television spots. Joplin reveals as much of herself as most people do under the flighty scrutiny of a TV interviewer--nothing.

The film makers were at pains to include footage in which Joplin talks about "feeling good." She comes off like Little Miss Good vibes, a wild flower of the love generation who wilted for reasons unspecified. Far worse than being merely sentimental, Janis is dishonest, dishonoring her talent by dismissing the personal turmoil that underscored it.

Home Again. One of the few telling and truthful moments in the film occurs during a press conference in Port Arthur, Texas, the home town Joplin despised and always tried to conquer. On this occasion, Joplin had returned for her tenth high school reunion ("They laughed me out of the state," she announced on a Dick Cavett show, "and now I'm goin' back"). The questions the local press cooked up were trite--was Janis happy in school? Did she get in vited to the prom? But her answers, out of the direct pressures of the circumstances, were without artifice and painful.

Janis does provide one other valuable service. For everyone who thought her singing pushed too hard, who turned off Joplin because of the brazen way she went after an audience, this movie will make clear how deeply she needed that kind of wild acceptance. When Janis talked about feeling good, it always came out forced. When she sang, though, people responded, not so much to the exultation of her music as to the plea and the desperation that lay close underneath it all. Twice in the film--after performances at the Monterey Festival and a Cavett show --we watch her receive stops-out acclaim with hungry thanks and with a look of full radiance. Joplin's misfortune was that she lived so hard just for those moments. qedJ.C.

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