Corbijn has little Control over Joy Division

In theaters Friday: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Meet Dave

New on DVD: Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Stop-Loss, Superhero Movie

I finally saw Control last night, photographer Anton Corbijn’s icy debut feature about Joy Division, the late 1970s band he worked with, and particularly its troubled lead singer, Ian Curtis, who took his own life in 1980. Like much of Joy Division’s musical output, Control almost willfully avoids dramatic highs and lows, just teasing the audience with slow building tension, a frozen rope of a narrative that is gorgeous in its potential but frustrating in its constraint. I was hoping the film would reveal the churning inner gears of Curtis’ mind, but instead we get another snapshot of the factory doors. After two hours of Corbijn’s film, the Joy Division leader is as enigmatic as ever.

What drove the intensely introverted Curtis to want to get married while still in his teens? What gave him the confidence to join an existing rock band as its lead singer? These questions are not answered in the first act of the film, making it difficult to grasp what comes later: his infidelity, his stage fright and his depression. While I appreciate Corbijn’s attachment to silent, gorgeously rendered black and white images and to mid-1970s David Bowie tunes, these can’t really replace depth of character and dialogue to tell the story of a figure so alarmingly creative and complex and Ian Curtis.

For his part, though, Sam Riley does Curtis well, his recessive English-cool performance spiked with scenes of epileptic seizures and the white-boy funk dance moves Curtis was known for on stage. And the brilliant Samantha Morton is the beating heart of the story, playing Curtis’ long-suffering wife, Debbie, on whose memoir the film is loosely structured. Her emotions become our emotions as the plot progresses, but riding on the crest of someone perpetually on the sidelines is like reading about Michael Jordan from the perspective of Luke Longley. It is not as thrilling as it should be.

Did Curtis and his band ever feel exhilarated touring Europe and becoming successful? Or were they really the perpetual mopes Corbijn tells us they were? I hope not. Otherwise every character’s climactic tears are less devastating, and more detached, like Curtis himself. I’m Not There may have been the perfect title for a recent Bob Dylan biopic, but it works just fine for this otherwise relevant film. Love can indeed tear us apart, but it takes commitment and sacrifice to get to the point of rewarding vulnerability. Corbijn’s version of Curtis seems to have been born at that point, stunted and defensive, leaving him and the audience with little else to do but hum along to the downfall.

This week sees the release of a documentary based on another music icon of that era, The Clash’s Joe Strummer. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is out now on DVD, and I hope to have a review up soon.

And in the Filter’s now-obligatory Batnews, The Dark Knight continues to reel in splendid advance reviews. But I won’t be reading any of those. I’m on black out from any reviews, articles and spoilers from the movie. A friend was even playing some bootleg clips on his laptop the other day, and I refused to look. Holy willpower Batman! Let’s see if I can make to July 18 unspoiled.