Documentaries

From the Sky Down (Director: Davis Guggenheim): When asked to choose the best two albums in U2’s cata­logue, most fans and music critics will pick 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby. That the band’s strongest work is on albums that sound so rad­ic­ally dif­ferent from one another is, even two dec­ades later, fairly astounding, and points emphat­ic­ally to the group’s renowned dis­dain for cre­ative passivity. As frontman Bono has fam­ously said, Achtung Baby was “the sound of four men cut­ting down The Joshua Tree”, as U2 struggled to cope with super­stardom and needed to “go away and dream it all up again.” That hard-fought musical and per­sonal journey for the band forms the found­a­tion of From the Sky Down, dir­ected by Davis Guggenheim (best known for An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman). Guggenheim, who had pre­vi­ously dir­ected U2 gui­tarist The Edge in his under­seen 2008 film It Might Get Loud, was approached by the band to put together some sort of visual doc­u­ment to tie in with the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Achtung Baby.

From the Sky Down takes a sur­pris­ingly brief glimpse at the band’s overall his­tory and I was also some­what taken aback by the com­plete absence of any men­tion of what they might have up their sleeve for the future. No, the focus here is almost entirely on the late 80s-early 90s era of the group, a refreshing approach from a rock doc­u­mentary format that tra­di­tion­ally only offers a quickly moving bio­graph­ical sum­mary, with little allow­ance for a truly in-depth exam­in­a­tion of par­tic­ular periods or albums. Perhaps the band was inspired by The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, another high pro­file doc that decon­structed the making of a classic album from their friend and peer, Bruce Springsteen. From the Sky Down fea­tures extensive one-on-one inter­views with each member of the band (they’re rounded out by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton) that provide a com­pre­hensive revis­iting of a period that began just after the band’s explo­sion in pop­ularity with the release of The Joshua Tree, through to the begin­ning of their land­mark Zoo TV Tour in 1992. Not sur­pris­ingly, the inter­views with the sharp-witted Bono are the most rev­el­atory and enter­taining. Special atten­tion is paid to 1988’s Rattle and Hum, the much-derided and mis­un­der­stood doc­u­mentary (with a com­panion album) that chron­icled U2’s bur­geoning interest in American roots music. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the film, but the band admits their mes­sage was mis­in­ter­preted and only rein­forced many people’s opinion of the Irish quartet as self-important and insuf­fer­able per­son­al­ities. Guggenheim makes good use of some pre­vi­ously unseen Rattle and Hum out­takes, including one that shows an irate Bono rip­ping on some incom­petent stage workers.

Achtung Baby’s dif­fi­cult recording ses­sions form the heart of the film, with addi­tional per­spective provided by the album’s pro­du­cers (Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno), engineer (Flood), and long­time pho­to­grapher (Anton Corbijn). Guggenheim recon­venes the group at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where recording began, but where little res­ults were pro­duced due to cre­ative fric­tion and road­b­locks. Bono and The Edge wanted to take U2’s sound in a more elec­tronic, exper­i­mental dir­ec­tion, with which Mullen Jr. and Clayton couldn’t come to terms. The occa­sional anim­a­tion sequences that Guggenheim employs (accom­panied by band member voi­ceovers taken from their inter­views) are used to best effect here, with one sequence showing meta­phor­ical walls being erected between the four band­mates. The visual takes on even more sym­bolic meaning, con­sid­ering they were in the city during the fall of the Berlin Wall. The band digs out and reflects on old demos, and talks about their song­writing pro­cess, which fre­quently fea­tures Bono using gib­berish (dubbed “Bongolese”) in place of unwritten lyrics. Two songs get the most atten­tion: “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” The former, ori­gin­ally titled “Sick Puppy,” helped the band turn a corner from their cre­ative dif­fi­culties and even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of “One,” which sprang from an idea used in the ori­ginal bridge in “Mysterious Ways.” The two tracks were the only ones from the album that were com­pleted in Berlin, with the rest fin­ished back home in Dublin.

Guggenheim’s decision to bookend the film with scenes from the group’s much-hyped appear­ance at this past summer’s Glastonbury Festival is only mod­er­ately effective, but he cap­tures some great footage of the band rehearsing various Achtung Baby songs in pre­par­a­tion for the big gig (one of the filming loc­a­tions is Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre, during a tour stop in the city this past spring). The standouts include a rough run-through of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” which really jumped out of the speakers of the Ryerson Theatre’s sound system, and a rare solo vocal per­form­ance from The Edge of the album’s haunting closing song, “Love Is Blindness.” U2 has always been a band that has been quite pro­tective of their cre­ative pro­cess, and judging by the loose­ness and candour demon­strated by the band as we see them revisit old songs and exper­i­ment with arrange­ments (we see Bono yelling out upcoming chord changes to the rest of the group), it’s clear that Guggenheim was able to cul­tivate an intimate level of trust with his subjects.

Shot over the course of six months earlier this year and com­pleted just a week before its world premiere last month at TIFF, Guggenheim’s doc­u­mentary digs deep down into the inner work­ings of a band at a pivotal and tumul­tuous phase in their career. My only com­plaint about From the Sky Down would be that the dir­ector doesn’t quite dig deep enough when it comes to looking at the whole of Achtung Baby, an album that Bono says in the film “is the reason we’re still here now.” An inor­dinate amount of atten­tion is paid to the cre­ation of “Mysterious Ways” and “One” (which are important songs, to be sure), while other not­able tracks such as “The Fly,” “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” and “Until the End of the World” are included only as per­form­ances or over the soundtrack, with little or no detail or insight into their ori­gins. One of the album’s best songs, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” isn’t men­tioned at all, nor can I recall even hearing a snippet of it in the film. Despite this rel­at­ively minor neg­ative, From the Sky Down is loaded with pos­it­ives that make it essen­tial viewing for any U2 fan.

Tagged as: music, U2

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