![]() Beyond the music, Ray’s and Saliers’ constant openness to personal self-assessment, including where they each fit on the queer spectrum, is fascinating and remarkable. The songs are good (even Pareles might concede now), the harmonies indisputable. No wonder, anyway, that she is the one who drifted more toward punky rock in the 2000s, in her solo projects and fronting a band called the Butchies as a side project, even as the more naturally conciliatory Saliers is seen drifting more toward her childhood country roots.īut ultimately the bulk of the movie is not spent on defense. ![]() It’s Ray, in general, who has the temper of the two, they both agree - and it’s up to the viewer to figure out whether she’s overreacting, say, in footage of her getting repeatedly pissed at concert soundmen, or whether she really was reacting righteously to a patriarchal attitude that assumed girls (or Girls) couldn’t know anything about sound. Ray really has an ability throughout the movie to cut to the quick, and acknowledge that there was a “mediocrity” to much of the acoustic-rock scene they came out of that they had to fight against and try to transcend. Ray, in particular, concedes that the critic was probably right when he criticized her “stagy, self-congratulatory gestures” at the time, even as she maintains a general eff-that-guy attitude. “If you guys had asked us to play on ‘SNL’ and then made fun of us, that’d be OK,” says Ray, who wonders if the lessening of comedic jabs at gay people still allows for mockery of the “old, gay and butch.” To the extent that the pair’s very name can still be a punchline, as a stand-in for “all-womyn,” that’s how far Bombach’s doc has to go in serving as a reclamation project for a historic act that has always deserved a lot better.Ĭritics have not always been kind to the Girls, either, as there’s another cringe-y scene in which Ray and Saliers are asked to read aloud from a 1989 New York Times review in which Jon Pareles (sounding meaner than he has at just about any point in the subsequent decades) wrote that “earnest pretentiousness has new standard-bearers” and “each Indigo Girl has a slightly different style of pretension.” Rather than just being an act of filmic self-flaggelation, this becomes one of the more interesting scenes, as they debate whether it was uncool to have brought that review up in their stage patter in concert at the time - or, more surprisingly, whether Pareles had some valid points. More often, the humor was thrust upon them, as in a quickly glimpsed “SNL” sketch in which Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch portrayed the pair as over-earnest bores. It was presented as knowing, affectionate humor from the inside, but the pair now agree that there was a level of self-homophobia in those vintage gags. Occasionally they participated in the humor themselves, as with their appearance in a 1998 episode of the “Ellen” sitcom, set at a “womyn’s festival,” which the two singers watch back on iPads and grimace to recall today. The feel-good aspects are plentiful enough that it comes as sort of a rude reawakening late in the film when the filmmaker presents a pained segment that’s a sort of anthology of pop-culture moments in which the so-called “lesbian folk-rock duo” was the butt of a lot of jokes, usually based in the idea that the Indigo Girls represented something no man or straight person would want to go near. Perhaps most winningly of all for the film’s chances with a wider audience, though, Ray and Saliers just turn out to be a couple of women that almost anybody would want to spend a couple of hours with, whether you knew it or not from distant memories of the singers as one-time icons of VH1. Granted, there’s some of that, too, but any case Bombach builds for the Girls being heroes feels fairly well-earned, and less hagiographic than many recent music docs that have come down the pike. Those differences go a long way in making sure the film doesn’t end up being too much of a conferral of sainthood. It just means there’s a whole rainbow’s worth of shadings about what it means to be LGBTQ, or human, just between Ray and Saliers themselves. In this case, “couldn’t be more different” isn’t a euphemism for “don’t really get along,” as it often is in duo or band situations.
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