Music for mending broken hearts

“I wouldn’t want to live in a world without art and music,” said Portland State professor and filmmaker Dustin Morrow, whose feature-length musical Everything Went Down screens this evening at the Northwest Film Center.

“[Everything Went Down] is almost an activist movie, because it makes a case for the value for music and art as something that we really can’t live without [and] that makes our lives bearable,” he said.

Morrow’s activism stems from his time working with the Arts and Quality of Life Research Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, where Morrow last taught.

The center “provides programs and hosts conferences on music therapy and art therapy,” Morrow said. “I got to see firsthand that music…can actually have a distinct physiological effect on people…I wanted to tell a story that showed how music could be a healing agent because I was sort of dismayed…seeing funding for the arts get cut and cut and cut.”

The story that Morrow wanted to tell became Everything Went Down, a “musical about music,” as the film’s opening credits put it.

Everything Went Down tells the story of Will Samuelson (Noah Drew), a graphic designer and college professor still struggling with the passing of his young wife two years after her death.

Will spends his free time in his empty house, ensconced in sweats and a robe, watching old home movies of his dead wife. He sleeps outside in a tent on “bad nights” when dreams of her torment him.

One day, after a particularly frustrating session of professor-ing (side note: can just one film please portray a college professor as legitimately happy and not some sad sack who resigned himself to teaching for the health coverage?), Will bumps into Chelsea Ray (Kate Tucker), an alt-country chanteuse on campus to promote an upcoming coffee shop gig.

Will hears Chelsea’s music on the campus radio station as he drives home and it stops him in his tracks: Since his wife’s death, Will had stopped listening to music, but Chelsea’s melodies awaken something in him. Pretty soon, her music is all he can listen to.

The music that Will finds so arresting is the actual music of Kate Tucker, an actual alt-rock/country songwriter and musician now based out of Nashville who made her acting debut in Everything Went Down.

“I knew of her music and I really loved it,” Morrow said. “Her music is very evocative and narrative, and I could see how her songs might lend themselves to telling a story.”

Morrow’s desire to tell a story of music’s healing powers coincided with his growing infatuation with soundtracks penned and performed by a single artist a la Simon and Garfunkel for The Graduate, Cat Stevens for Harold and Maude and Badly Drawn Boy for About a Boy.

“What happens when you have a movie like that is [the singer/songwriter] almost becomes like [a character] in the movie because you hear their voice over and over again,” Morrow said. “I liked the idea of a single-artist movie with the artist actually being in the movie.”

Morrow reached out to Tucker, who was initially reluctant to try her hand at acting.

“I had to kind of talk her into it, and it was just a hunch that I felt like she could probably do it,” Morrow said. “Her biggest worry about doing the project was that she was going to ruin the movie with a terrible performance, and she’s actually amazing.”

Tucker is a surprisingly strong actor for a first-timer, and Morrow’s right: Her music does become like another character, or perhaps a narrator, subtly guiding the story’s arc. Everything Went Down takes an organic, naturalistic approach to the musical genre, similar to John Carney’s 2006 surprise hit Once: There’s no dancing in the streets or impromptu sing-alongs in Morrow’s film.

“I wanted to make a musical that didn’t feel like any musical I’d ever seen,” Morrow said. Traditional musicals use “music as fantasy, as a device to take you out of the film into something more escapist. [Everything Went Down] is meant to be a film that gives you [a] story and characters that you care about in a very real way—people that feel real.”

Morrow’s film spends nearly all of its time with Will and Chelsea (and Tucker’s tunes), following them as they walk on piers, eat ice cream, drink coffee, play air hockey—real couple-y stuff.

But their relationship remains chaste and at least nominally platonic. In their respective times of need, they lean on each other: Chelsea tries to help Will dig through his widower’s emotional baggage and Will encourages Chelsea to pursue her music, which has hit a dead-end.

The film was shot in nine days in and around Bellingham, and the area’s sun-dappled, jaw-dropping vistas fit Tucker’s music nicely.

Plot-wise, Everything Went Down rarely surprises—there are the requisite dilemmas about moving too fast, and Chelsea’s music spurs Will to blaze through a litany of Symbolic Moving-On Gestures. But, for the most part, Morrow’s film is a gorgeous ride with a pretty killer mix tape drifting out of the speakers.