portrait of a comic genius with self-destructive impulses

OCS CITY – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 AT 10:50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

John Belushi remained until the worldwide success of The Blues Brothers (1980), by John Landis, an essentially American phenomenon, star in the second half of the 1970s of “Saturday Night Live” – ​​the entertainment program broadcast on NBC in which all the future stars of comedy appeared: Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell – where he holds, a rare occurrence, the functions of actor and screenwriter, and who suddenly disappears in 1982, at the age of 33, victim of an overdose.

The documentary that RJ Cutler devotes to him not only draws the forced trajectory of a comic genius, with the self-destructive impulses inseparable from this talent. He meticulously reconstructs the thread of an existence, from audio recordings, recently found, with the testimonies of those close to Belushi: his companions from “Saturday Night Live”, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd (with whom he forms the duo of The Blues Brothers); directors John Landis, Michael Apted, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman; actress Carrie Fisher; the comedian’s widow, Judy Belushi Pisano.

Here emerges the portrait of an artist aware of his unusual talent, inhabited by an unusual self-confidence, while nothing intended this son of a restaurant owner to go on stage or to express himself in front of the cameras. , and yet, from the start, confronted with demons that he will never be able to tame.

national treasure

This documentary must be placed in a particular perspective. In the United States, star of The Blues Brothers so, and of 1941, by Steven Spielberg (released in 1979), revealed on the big screen by a comedy by John Landis, American College (1978) – set in an American university and became a public success that no producer had anticipated – Belushi serves as a national treasure. He remains the most gifted actor of his generation, whose chubby and expressive face crosses the best comedies of the second half of the 1970s.

A founding work by Bob Woodward, “Wired” (1984), has long remained the reference survey on the comedian

A seminal work by Bob Woodward, Wired (1984, translated into French, in 2015, by Capricci, under the title John Belushi. The crazy and tragic life of a Blues Brother), has long remained the benchmark survey on the comedian. The journalist from washington post who, in the company of Carl Bernstein, revealed the Watergate affair, drew up a clinical observation of Belushi’s wanderings, and stigmatized a drug culture, shared by the actor’s entourage, a microcosm that will have nothing significant fact to get him out of this way.

the Belushi by RJ Cutler is placed more in his artistic orbit. The actor appears as this Rabelaisian character in American College, described by John Landis as a cartoon in action, an actor who became an obsession for the American director, as his expressiveness became a special effect in itself. Belushi becomes that man apart, describing each of his “Saturday Night Live” sketches as “suicide missions”a nihilist endowed with an extraordinary vitality, a subversive artist, in fact, who will become his own victim.