True Stories – REVIEW

David Byrne in True Stories


David Byrne is a weirdo. If you know anything about him, you could probably put that together. Having any sort of similarity getting demolished is Byrne’s own cohesion, so if you want any sort of cohesion, True Stories isn’t the movie for you. Whenever I ask someone about this movie, they can’t really explain it. What I find interesting about that is that the title card says it all: True Stories: A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas. That’s really all to it. As well as directing the film, Byrne plays The Narrator, who visits the fictional town of Virgil, Texas during its 150th anniversary celebrations. He converses with the townspeople, where all of them have their own things happening. A bachelor trying to find a woman to settle down with, a married couple who never talk to each other, a woman who lies about literally everything, and a conspiracy theorist preacher are just some of the citizens that we focus on throughout the film. There’s barely a plot, as well. The Narrator just takes the viewer on a little tour of this town for 90 minutes, and then we’re done. Edward Lachman’s cinematography feels like it’s a series of moving postcard photos, especially with the many landscape shots that are throughout the film. It also helps that the music from Talking Heads is a lot of fun, which a majority is performed by the cast. John Goodman’s performance of “People Like Us” is probably my favorite out of the bunch, and the Criterion Blu-Ray I got for Christmas actually has all of the performances on CD for the first time, so actually getting to hear them outside of the film is nice too (the Talking Heads album of the same name is just as good). If you want a little bit of a framing device for True Stories, imagine Byrne as an alien presenting Earth to his species to see what those strange humans are up to. It’s very tough to categorize True Stories as anything, really. Musical, comedy, slice-of-life, drama… it’s as Byrne himself says: “a completely cool, multi-purpose movie.” No matter the purpose, I was smiling so hard that my face went numb.


Ryan’s Grade: A