Matthew Heineman finds warmth and feeling in Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad’s shared life. The music-making gets less attention than it deserves, but their company makes this uneven documentary worth an evening.
Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony is a moving documentary with a frustratingly incomplete account of how its music gets made. It follows Jon Batiste’s creative work alongside Suleika Jaouad’s cancer treatment, allowing their affection and humour to matter as much as the difficulties they face. There is enough here to recommend, particularly for anyone interested in how a couple keeps living through illness. Those hoping to understand the decisions behind the music will have to accept quite a few gaps.
The couple’s scenes together are what hold our attention. Suleika Jaouad has humour and affection to offer alongside the demands of treatment, and Jon Batiste has someone to respond to without having to perform for an audience. These exchanges justify the time spent away from the music, because the relationship is interesting in its own right. The film is sensibly reluctant to make every shared pleasure an occasion for solemn reflection, and the warmth between them prevents the account of illness from becoming dutiful.
Cinematographers Thorsten Thielow, Matthew Heineman and Tony Hardmon make that closeness useful, giving small changes of mood enough attention to register. The airport shoe-shine scene is particularly welcome: Jon Batiste briefly becomes someone carrying on with an ordinary day, away from the demands of performance. We get a sense of a person whose company might be interesting even without the music. This is where the intimate camerawork does its job, allowing us to watch unguarded behaviour without insisting on its importance.
The music, by Jon Batiste, is strongest when the film lets us attend to its making. We were moved by the piano-and-trombone scene, which gives us time to hear a musical idea take shape. Watching that process is engaging without every technical choice being translated, and it briefly makes the film’s interest in creation feel properly earned. More attention of this kind would have helped, especially when the documentary asks us to care about the work as well as the person doing it.
The editing is shared by Matthew Heineman, Sammy Dane, Jim Hession and Fernando Villegas, who move between creative work and the experience of illness. That movement makes sense, but it repeatedly interrupts our chance to follow the music-making in any depth. The film raises our curiosity about the choices behind the music, then gives us too little to satisfy it. Across 104 minutes, there is room to give the compositions more attention without sacrificing the couple’s private moments.
That is a significant limitation in a documentary about a musician, though it does not undo the value of the time spent with this couple. The genre can become a dutiful tour through achievements, and this film is better when it stays with work, worry and ordinary conversation. We do not need a comprehensive career account, but a little more patience with a musical idea would help. The humour and affection are reason enough to stay. Choose it for a portrait of the relationship, with modest expectations of how much it will explain about composition.
