- Running time:
- 144 minutes
- Rated:
- PG-13
- Director:
- Kevin Macdonald
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Overall User Rating:
-
(0 ratings)
Bob Marley was one those singers whose name rivaled his music. By the time cancer took him at age 36 in 1981, he was as much a political symbol as a poetic songwriter.
Marley (***½ stars out of four; PG-13; opens Friday in select cities), an astounding documentary from TheLast King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald, evens out the legend some by supplementing the music with archival footage and a portrait of Marley's squalid Jamaican home that makes his rise to fame all the more astounding.
Sprinkled with riffs, concert footage and home videos, the family-authorized documentary does what the artist usually did: When in doubt, return to the beat. The singer, Marley asserts, was more than a deft musician. He knew the political power of music and was unafraid to wield it.
Far from his image as the pot-smoking reggae king, the singer comes off as a savvy businessman and an artist who understood marketing. Marley shuttled his Wailers bandmates in a bus to Jamaican clubs and sometimes played for free in order to get their music heard.
Macdonald's warts-and-all approach makes Marley sing. Blended with the beats are harsh realities: Marley's children paint him as a hyper-competitive dad, one who didn't slow down in a foot race with first-graders. The movie does a nice job of capturing the tension between Marley and Peter Tosh, who left the band in 1974.
The film also captures the near unspeakable poverty that surrounded Marley — he was born in a single-room hut to a teenage Jamaican mother and a white 60-year-old captain in the British marines — and explores his outcast status for being bi-racial and Rastafarian.
Still, the film demonstrates, Marley muted his anger through music and kept the peace lyrically to become reggae's musical and political king. Halfway into Marley, you see how the man would become as big as his work.
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