Freed from conventional biographical narrative, Girard’s elegant, coolly funny movie employs myriad techniques: animation by Norman McLaren; documentary interviews with colleagues, family and acquaintances; X-ray photography (in a segment describing the massive amounts of pills the hypochondriacal Gould would consume in a day); a fanciful enactment of Gould interviewing himself. Colm Feore, the Canadian stage actor who plays the intensely self-involved Gould, mesmerizes without ever raising his voice. Gould, who gave up concert appearances at the age of 31, withdrawing into the heady solitude of the recording studio, believed in the anonymity of the artist. Like other famous recluses (Salinger comes to mind), his withdrawal only fed the cult of his personality. By the time of his death, in 1982 at the age of 50, he had become an international legend; a Gould performance of Bach was sent into space on both the Voyager satellites.
The movie, and Feore’s quietly obsessive performance, is a demonstration of the social power of the man who walks away from the world (Gould, who produced a radio documentary on “The Idea of North,” longed to live a winter above the Arctic Circle). He lived his life in an aural universe, and in one fine vignette in a truck-stop cafe, we hear the world through Gould’s ears as he tunes in and out of conversations, background noises, Petula Clark’s “Downtown” on the radio. His was a busy solitude, teeming with intellect; Girard refuses the easy pathos of equating isolation with loneliness. Feore’s wry Gould wears a half smile of self-amusement. This crisply captivating portrait of the artist finds an unconventional style to match Gould’s own: ascetic, speculative, passionately detached. Only a very unusual film about a famous pianist would refuse to show even one scene where Feore sits at a piano and
