Mark Reviews Movies: ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON & THE BAND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

The dead, of course, cannot speak, but watching Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson & the Band, we wonder what they might have said. The Band, one of the most renowned rock groups of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, had five members, but only one of them really appears in this documentary.

That's because three of them—Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel—are dead, and Garth Hudson, the fourth member, is, well, technically here, if only momentarily. He appears with such little fanfare that he might as well be just another of the movie's many talking heads. One wonders if the interview was filmed under misleading pretenses or for an entirely different project (I'm actually starting to wonder if I imagined his appearance in the movie in anything other than the archival footage, but there are reports from other writers that he does show up here in a recently filmed interview).

The movie belongs, as the subtitle suggests, to Robbie Robertson, who talks us through his personal history, the formation of the praised group that they would become, and the group's almost-decade-long stint as the Band. Robertson likes to talk—mostly about himself. That's his right, obviously, and maybe even his privilege, given his importance to music and the circumstances under which a documentary about the Band is being made now. That's no excuse, though, for director Daniel Roher, who seems to have little to no interest in any other member of the Band.

There's a little irony here. The Band, as this quintet, really got their start as backup to Bob Dylan, during that controversial period when the legendary folk singer decided to put down his acoustic guitar for a bit and go electric. When they set off on their own, they went back to the roots—of rock as blues and folk and country. By the time their career as the Band ended, they were hailed and adored by the public, critics, and fellow musicians alike. Their farewell performance in 1976, captured on film by none other than Martin Scorsese (who, in addition to producing this documentary, appears as a talking head) in The Last Waltz, had guest appearances by the likes of Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and Muddy Waters (plus many more, whose names would be equally impressive).

Now, at least as told by this movie, the entire history of the Band belongs to Robertson. Everyone else is just the backup.

What's the story Robertson wants to tell, then? Well, it has to do with his childhood, learning the guitar at a young age (Thanks, in part, to visiting his mother's family at the Six Nations Reserve) and becoming shrewd at business—especially promotion (A thing he learned from the family of his biological father, who was a gangster). As a teenager, he started a band, which got him a gig writing songs for and eventually joining Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. He says—and Hawkins more or less confirms—that Robertson recruited Danko, Manuel, and Hudson to the group. Since Helm was already Hawkins' drummer, the Band, as they would eventually be known, was unofficially formed.

The rest of the movie is filled with anecdotes—some from Hawkins and a couple of others, who were around to see things, but mostly from Robertson—and archival footage of performances and photographs of downtime. The professional stories are sometimes intriguing or amusing (Robertson explaining how odd the Dylan years—when they basically got paid to tour the United States and Europe just to get booed—were is funny), and Roher does put in some effort to give the other members of the Band at least some voice through archival interviews.

The details and information that they offer, though, are of minimal impact. The whole story is framed within Robertson's perspective, with a lengthy story about him meeting the woman who would become his wife (They had children and later divorced, although you'd only know half of that from the movie) and some odd episodes. There was the time that two members of the Band, now drinking and using drugs to excess, got into two separate car accidents on the same night, and there's also the weird story about Robertson hiring a hypnotist to accompany him on stage—not as part of the show, but as a means to keep his stage fright from getting to him.

The music matters, of course, and we hear it and see it performed. Talking heads—from Clapton, to Scorsese, to Bruce Springsteen—explain how great it is and how familiar but unique it was at the time.

Significant pieces of information are missing, though. Part of that is the unfortunate consequence of time, but a lot of it is that Roher, only communicating events from Robertson's point of view, rushes through the vital, more personal history of the Band (especially whatever led to their break-up, which the main subject just dismisses as an inevitability). We're not even getting half the story in Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson & the Band. "And the Band" is, at least, spot-on

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