Levon Helm acted the way he made music, without asking to be noticed. His films are a handful of fathers and old men in other people's stories, and the best of them, in Coal Miner's Daughter, is the truest thing on screen.
Fi1m perspective
The scene we keep coming back to lasts about a minute. In Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), Loretta is on the bus that will take her and Mooney to Washington state, and her father Ted has walked down the hill to say goodbye. He stands with his hands in his pockets and cannot get the words out. Helm does nothing with it. He fails to speak, Sissy Spacek watches him fail from the window, and in a film full of concert halls that was the moment that moved us most. It is because he is not playing a man who cannot speak. He is a man who has run out of the thing he came to say.
It was his first film. He was forty, had spent the best part of two decades as the drummer and a singer in The Band, and had been filmed before only as himself, in The Last Waltz (1978). He had never trained as an actor and did not pretend otherwise. What he had was an Arkansas boyhood and the habit, from years behind a drum kit, of holding a thing together without being the centre of it. Michael Apted's film puts him next to Spacek and lets that habit do the work.
The parts that followed were mostly of a kind. In The Right Stuff (1983) he is Jack Ridley, and he also narrates, so the whole film arrives in his slow Arkansas voice. In Smooth Talk (1985) he is Laura Dern's father. By The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) he is billed as Old Man with Radio, and in Shooter (2007) he has a few minutes as Mr Rate, a man who knows about guns, and it is the part of that film people mention. Tommy Lee Jones, who directed Three Burials, worked with him three times, which tells you how a certain kind of director regarded him.
We should be plain about the size of all this. Acting was the second job and the filmography is a modest one: supporting parts, a few scenes each, spread across nearly thirty years. He never carried a film and it is not obvious he wanted to. The parts also sit close together, fathers and old men and local men who have been where they are a long while, and we suspect a suit and a city would have undone him. He said as much himself in 1980: "You can't just laugh your way through it, but if you can entertain people by singin' or playin' an instrument, you can modulate yourself into the film situation." That is a musician talking about acting as a matter of tempo, and it is exactly how he did it.
Start with Coal Miner's Daughter and wait for the bus. Then The Right Stuff, where he is on screen less than you want and on the soundtrack more than you expect. After that it is a question of sitting through other people's films for the ten minutes when he walks in, says very little, and makes wherever he is standing feel lived in before he goes.
Biography
Levon Helm was an American actor and musician. He played Ted Webb, the father of Loretta Lynn, in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter.
Helm appeared in other films including The Right Stuff (1983) as Jack Ridley, Smooth Talk (1985), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), Shooter (2007) and In the Electric Mist (2009). He was born in Elaine, Arkansas, on 26 May 1940 and died on 19 April 2012.
