Indeed, the serious-mindedness of this film renders it something like Seth Tisue's Jandek Website: The Movie – it uses imagery from Jandek records and a slew of hipster talking heads to simply lay out the facts of the Jandek tale … except that there are not really any facts to lay out. Though the film invites you to experience Jandek's music without speculating too much about the man behind the curtain, it can't help but keep trying to pull that curtain aside. It's initially quite captivating, but as the minutes go by, there's a strong sense of making a mountain out of a molehill. At only 88 minutes, Jandek on Corwood feels like Masada. It says pretty much everything it needs to say within the first 15 minutes, and pads the running time with redundant speculation from several folks who take Jandek very seriously, and evocative photography intended to convey the deeply interior nature of Jandek's music. The film looks good, and it's well-organized, but I felt it strongly needed a sense of humor about its subject, if only to relieve the tedious urgency of the Jandek experts whose opinions do not ultimately shed much light on the man or his music. To me, Jandek is fascinating but also humorous – as the story goes, he's an outsider musician, from all credible accounts a suburban Houston businessman, who happens to have put out nearly 40 records in the past 30 years, none of which containing much in the way of what you might call a "song." Exploring his subconscious demons with an out-of-tune guitar and a lot of tape hiss, Jandek makes music so lonely-sounding that it makes backwoods Appalachian folk sound positively joyful by comparison. Because he's never released anything but the tiniest scraps of real information about himself, his enigmatic mythos has grown. You listen to his way-out and totally private music and try to reconcile the images you get in your head with the idea that the man creating it is just some normal dude with a job. That he's chosen this weird musical alter-ego as his hobby instead of golf is probably the bigger mystery. And it is in this aspect that Corwood really misses the mark: there is something undeniably funny about an upstanding, upper-middle-class man making Jandek records, and the movie goes well out of its way to suppress any notion of Jandek, conceptually, being kind of hilarious. Certainly I was gratified to see any movie about Jandek, but I was really hoping Corwood would provide a spin different from what anyone might glean through ten minutes of Googling Jandek. (Woof, what a phrase! Thank God the film was not called Googling Jandek.) But this film is at least twice as long as was really warranted, and builds so intensely to a "shock" ending (no spoiler, really: they play the only tape-recorded interview ever done with Jandek himself) that the bulk of the film comes off as unnecessary. The last five minutes form the entirety of truly eye-opening material; most of the rest is exactly the sort of navel-gazing speculation the filmmakers seem to want to advise against. All this said, I still heartily recommend Jandek on Corwood as an essential piece of hipster cinema, and an important addition to the ongoing saga of Jandek. I just don't want to have to sit through it again.
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