In tune with this tiny hint of optimism, Gervasi uses his film to trace the recrudescence of Anvil.
#Anvil band archive
(The film’s director, Sacha Gervasi, went from being a roadie for Anvil, in the eighties-the musicians called him Teabag, because he’s English-to working on an archive of Samuel Beckett material, so this film may represent an unrepeatable chance to merge his interests.) Many such gems fall from the mouth of Lips after everything on tour goes “drastically wrong,” he gently points out that “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” How can you not love a man who thinks like that, dredging the television of consolation from the swimming pool of disaster? “After all’s said and done, I can say that all has been said and done,” Lips remarks, sounding like a bankrupt in Dickens or a derelict in Beckett. Even here, though, the men’s ponderings have a sublime tone-a muted chord of resignation and expectancy that immediately puts you on their side. At one point, he wears a food worker’s hairnet, thereby morphing into a dead ringer for Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.” Reiner, meanwhile, has some sort of demolition job, which at least allows him to use a power drill-a short hop, surely, from the task of hammering out the beat in “Metal on Metal,” still the band’s signature song. We watch him delivering prepared meals to schools in Scarborough, Ontario, driving along snowy roads and musing on shepherd’s pie and meat loaf. “Anvil!” gets going in the present day, with the band half-forgotten, and Lips on the skids. I have noticed something similar in the bond between Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, of the British group Status Quo, and we should celebrate the way in which pairs of aging rockers tend to wind up like lovely, crumbling old married couples, with each one finishing the other’s sentences and pining when he has to go away.
“Because I love you,” Lips replies, quite without embarrassment or doubt. “Why am I your fall guy, constantfuckingly?” a plaintive Reiner asks, amid the angry fallout of a recording session. That symbiosis has come to fuse the pair so unbreakably that, at some points in the documentary, you can scarcely tell them apart-never more so than when they bicker, which is half the time. The decision that Lips and Robb reached as teen-agers, to rock together, is one that they have stuck to for thirty-six years. In 1973, in Toronto, he met a fellow-local named Robb Reiner, a drummer by vocation-and no relation to the Rob Reiner who directed “This Is Spinal Tap,” the great mock documentary about heavy metal, though both bands would relish the freak coincidence. To his friends and admirers, for visible reasons, he is Lips. (Specialists might prefer to file them under thrash metal, that delicate subset of the genre, but “Anvil!” is wise enough to steer clear of such hairsplitting, not least because, in a world where most of the guitarists look like exploded spaniels, there is an awful lot of hair to split.) Still, Anvil had its adherents, and we find a swarm of them in a clip of the Super Rock Festival of 1984, in Japan, where the band’s lead singer, Steve Kudlow, can be seen onstage playing his guitar with a sex toy, thus raising the question of whether he takes his plectrum to bed. It was never, according to the movie, one of the Big Four-a term that I always associated with the Paris peace conference of 1919, but which, on further inspection, turns out to refer to Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer. Back in the nineteen-eighties, Anvil was, if not huge, on the verge of hugeness.
But this film is about a failed heavy-metal band, which sounds about as purposeful as a vegan shark. No surprise in that, given the current state of feature films, or in the fact that “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” is a documentary about a heavy-metal band. The most stirring release of the year thus far is a documentary.
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