'They Shot the Piano Player' uses music and animation to tell a harrowing Brazilian story

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

Wed, March 6, 2024 at 11:07 AM UTC

4 min read

“They Shot the Piano Player” is one of those movies that, to hear it described, shouldn’t work — but it really does.

Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba’s film is a lot of things, almost all of them good. It’s a vibrant, colorful, animated movie. It’s a serious documentary about political oppression and violence. It’s a loving exploration of Brazilian bossa nova. The soundtrack is incredible.

It’s also a lot of Jeff Goldblum, which normally would be a good thing. But here it’s a little off. Still, that’s a minor quibble in what is ultimately a moving, loving and heartbreaking portrayal of an artist whose life and career were sacrificed on an absurd altar of terrorism — just one of hundreds of thousands of people who were tortured, killed or “disappeared.”

The film tells the story of Francisco Tenório Júnior

That artist is Francisco Tenório Júnior, the piano player of the title. He is in fact a Brazilian pianist and composer of renown, who disappeared in 1976 while on tour in Argentina after leaving his hotel one night to go to a store. He was never heard from again. Through more than 150 interviews, we learn about his life, his music, the genre and more.

The interviews are real, as are the subjects of them, though they are rendered in animation. If that sounds like it takes away from the seriousness of the matters at hand, it doesn’t. Instead, it’s amazingly effective, not just because it’s beautiful, but also because when we hear people reminisce about Ella Fitzgerald running from the club where she was playing, skipping the encore to listen to a band down the street, for instance. And we see her do it.

It’s the framing device that is odd. The film begins and ends at a reading at the Strand, a bookstore in New York. A (fictional) New Yorker writer named Jeff Harris (voice of Goldblum) is signing and reading from his new book, “They Shot the Piano Player.” He was able to parlay a New Yorker story about bossa nova into a book contract and a trip to Rio de Janeiro to report it. That’s where he hears the story of Tenório Júnior, and becomes obsessed by it. Eventually Harris scraps the original book to write one about Tenório Júnior.

Mariscal and Trueba unspool the story like a mystery. Harris, through his extensive interviews, is able to piece together bits and pieces of Tenório Júnior’s story and the circumstances of his disappearance, in as much as they can be determined. Although “mystery” may not be completely accurate. There’s no real mystery about Tenório Júnior’s ultimate fate, though the details are fuzzy. Harris, as a surrogate for the filmmakers, is able to arrive eventually at more detail, all of it horrifying.

Jeff Goldblum is always going to be Jeff Goldblum

Along the way, as we hear from some of the giants of the bossa nova scene, we hear some fantastic music. Here again, the animation is a plus — it really brings the music to life, and vice versa. A saxophonist remembering dancing in the streets during Carnival plays out as exciting as it sounds. There is such joy in the music and in the appreciation of it — joy that will be tempered by tanks in the streets, ordered there by a murderous regime. (The U.S. involvement in South American politics is not overlooked.)

Goldblum’s performance is appropriately heartfelt. It’s just that he can’t stop being Goldblum. This works for him in a live-action performance, but here it throws things off just a little. (Which is to say, Harris doesn’t look anything like Goldblum, but of course sounds exactly like him. And that is a particular sound you can’t shake.)

Imagine creating art in these circumstances. It’s likely that Tenório Júnior wasn’t political, that being a musician might have been enough to put him on the wrong side of the government. Or that his abduction was a case of mistaken identity. Some details, Harris acknowledges, we will never know. He also notes that, while interviewing Tenório Júnior’s children, he will never see his grandchildren. And yet his music remains.

Is that enough? It has to be.