“He literally parts the sea.” Late in The Torch, a documentary profile of blues guitarist Buddy Guy, talking head Carlos Santana describes an all-star concert where Guy took the stage after B. B. King and Eric Clapton, among others, had left. “I haven’t said my piece,“ Guy announced to the audience. Then, Santana continues, Guy played a single note that sounded like, “A thousand dinosaurs screaming.” That’s the kind of energy one would have hoped for from the Chicago blues elder who’s worked with Muddy Waters and had a late career milestone with the scary good Sweet Tea. But despite the high-temperature title and plenty of reverence served to the master, the movie, while full of good music, lacks the dramatic structure to make Guy a more compelling character.
What drama there is here comes from Quinn Sullivan, the young tyke Guy has mentored for more than 10 years; but the narrative introduces him far too soon—like, almost immediately. After some introductory footage of Guy at his namesake Chicago nightclub, the camera follows a man approaching the club with his guitar case. You don’t see his face at first, and when you do first see the still peach-fuzzed Sullivan, you wonder, what’s this little white kid doing in Buddy Guy’s life story?
It turns out Sullivan has toured with his mentor Guy for more than a decade, since the rising axe-boy was just seven years old. Sullivan has chops—as you can see in VHS home footage, he got his first guitar when he was three and was impressively fluent within a few years—and the young man apparently invigorated the elder bluesman in the autumn of his career.
But, like Green Book and less infamously Round Midnight before them, The Torch (its title, after all, suggesting that Guy is handing it down to Sullivan), raises the question: why do you need a white character to tell this story after all? Didn’t Guy lead enough of an interesting life to stand apart from the framing device of a young whippersnapper? And if the movie needed to be framed in that manner, why not tell Guy’s story first and then bring in the young hotshot for dramatic conflict?
Well, maybe Sullivan’s coming-of-age offers the only real tension in a fairly straightforward arc. Guy himself came up as a shy young man playing with Junior Wells and Muddy Waters in the ‘60s, and his smoking electric guitar was a bridge from the Chicago blues past to the Jimi Hendrix future.
But it’s telling that the supporting figures repeatedly point to potentially more fruitful approaches. Like songwriter Tom Hambridge, who explains that when he started writing material for Guy, he’d sit next to him on the tour bus and just listen to him tell his stories, capturing the bluesman’s voice and deploying certain phrases that came straight from Guy’s mouth.
Director Jim Farrell clearly loves Guy, who paints a vivid picture in his favorite polka-dots and seems like a genuinely nice, modest master. One wishes for a rawer Les Blank-style intimacy instead of drone footage that takes you to a rural Louisiana blues bar (there must have been more of a story to tell there).
One can understand the omission of the great 2001 album Sweet Tea, the rawest music he made in the 21st century; it’s maybe too raw for this journeyman tale. But what a movie that would have made. It’s apt to end with another chestnut from Santana, the liveliest talking head on view. Explaining how he had to come up with his own voice to distinguish himself as a guitarist in a world full of them, he says, “I gotta find a different way to scramble the eggs.” The Torch has enough good music to make a decent omelet, but if only they’d found a different way to scramble the material.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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