Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On (2022)
(On Cable TV, November 2022) There’s been a fascinating third (fourth?) act to singer-activist Buffy Sainte-Marie’s life over the past twenty-five years or so. After a number of lower-visibility years, she re-emerged as a legendary figure of sorts, her history being more relevant to a more socially conscious age embracing First Nations figures. In Canada, she has been claimed as a national treasure—which seems a bit limiting, considering how her life and career spanned both Canada and the United States. Tribute shows, lifetime achievement awards, renewed media attention, well-received activism, and a stamp issue complete with a collector’s framed blow-up (which I bought as a gift) are all evidence of her new stature despite/because having been marginalized from the United States musical mainstream after (we’re told) government intervention. Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On is a fully authorized portrait of the artist’s career and her life now. The tone will be a familiar one for fans of collaborative biopics: She gets to narrate much of the material, and the film focuses on her story as told by herself. She goes have a striking screen presence: She looks amazing at eighty (!), and her ability to get us to listen remains exceptional. Then there’s her record, which speaks for itself—from participating in the legendary Manhattan mid-1960s folk scene to more radical activism that got her banned from airplay lists, from being a recurring Sesame Street guest to winning an Academy Award for writing “Up Where We Belong,” to innovating in matters of electronic music production and being an accomplished visual artist: It’s a lot! Now, still speaking her mind sixty years after emerging on the international scene, the film offers us a portrait of nothing less than a First Nation elder: wise and serene, but not complacent. It’s a really good overview if you accept the limits of what a fully authorized tribute can do: for instance, there’s a rather less-than-convincing moment in which a guest tries to excuse some bad business decisions by claiming that she wasn’t trying to do the same thing as everyone else. (That bit may have been better left as an outtake.) Sainte-Marie was eclipsed by many of her contemporaries, but anyone can now argue that she’s far better placed than them—still alive, revered and generous in passing her wisdom to younger generations. This film is one of the main exhibits. [December 2024: Ooof, this review has not aged well at all, considering the December 2023 CBC exposé that demolished Sainte-Marie as a pretendian, and no serious rebuttals in the year since then. I’m leaving it up anyway—although, in retrospect, I should have listened more closely to my “but what’s her specific link to indigenous ancestry?” alarm that chimed dimly as I watched the documentary. For a reviewer, it’s useful to be humbled from time to time.]
