r. J. Cutler replaces in his artistic orbit the most gifted actor of his generation, star of the legendary “The Blues Brothers”, death of an overdose, in 1982, at 33 years.
By
John Belushi remained until the world success of The Blues Brothers (1980), by John Landis, an essentially American phenomenon, star in the second half of the 1970s of “Saturday Night Live” – the entertainment program broadcast on NBC in which all the future comic stars pass: Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell – where he holds, rare, the functions of actor and screenwriter, and which brutally disappears, in 1982, Age of 33 years, victim of an overdose.
The documentary devoted to him by R. J. Cutler does not only draw the constrained trajectory of a comic genius, with the inseparable self -destructive impulses of this talent. He meticulously reconstructs the thread of an existence, from audio recordings, found recently, with the testimonies of the relatives of Belushi: his accomplices of “Saturday Night Live”, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd (in the company of which he forms the duo from The Blues Brothers); Directors John Landis, Michael Apted, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman; Carrie Fisher actress; The actor’s widow, Judy Belushi Pisano.
takes shape here the portrait of a conscious artist of his unusual talent, inhabited by unusual self -confidence, while nothing intended this son of a restaurant boss to go on stage or to express himself In front of the cameras, and yet, from the start, confronted with demons that he will never manage to tame.
national treasure
This documentary must be located from a particular perspective. In the United States, the star of The Blues Brothers therefore, and from 1941, by Steven Spielberg (released in 1979), revealed on the big screen by a comedy by John Landis, American College (1978) – taking place in an American university and Become a public success that no producer had anticipated -, Belushi acts as a national treasure. He remains the most gifted actor of his generation, whose baby and expressive face crosses the best comedies of the second half of the 1970s.
A founding work of Bob Woodward, Wired (1984, translated into French, in 2015, at Capricci, under the title John Belushi. The crazy and tragic life of a Blues Brother), has long remained the reference investigation On the actor. The journalist of the Washington Post who had, in the company of Carl Bernstein, revealed the Watergate affair, drawn up a clinical observation of Belushi’s wanderings, and stigmatized a drug culture, shared by the entourage of the actor, a microcosm who will have done nothing significant to get it out of this path.
The Belushi of R. J. Cutler is more replaced in his artistic orbit. The actor appears as this Rabelaisian character in American College, described by John Landis as an animated cartoon, an actor who has become an obsession for the American director, as his expressiveness became a special effect in itself. Belushi becomes this man apart, describing each of his sketches of “Saturday Night Live” as “suicide missions”, a nihilist endowed with extraordinary vitality, a subversive artist, in fact, who will become his own victim.