THE QUIET ONE (2019)
Starring Bill Wyman, Suzanne Accosta, Tony Chapman
Directed by Oliver Murray
Written by Oliver Murray
Distributed by Sundance Selects. 109 minutes. Now playing at Laemmle Monica Film Center and available to stream on demand.
It takes a certain type of character to be a bass player in a rock band. Not being watched like the lead singer or lead guitarist, and getting overpowered by the drummer, unless you’re Paul McCartney, it’s an egoless job, providing subdued unifying groove to unite all instruments. They also have a chance to observe, apart from the insanity. And when you’re the bassist in the largest rock band in the world, as Bill Wyman shows, it’s an even more impressive journey.
The Quiet One is a documentary that follows Wyman, the long-standing bassist of the Stones from the beginning through their last tour in the nineties. The Quiet One seeks to give a modest spotlight to a humble figure, a man who wasn’t Mick or Keith.
Most impressively, he was a proper archivist. Starting out in an archive – almost a library – we see bookshelves of boxes, layered with years’ memories. Cameras of all kinds, instruments, posters, and buttons, all annotated in a neat fashion. The mapping that goes on might be the opposite of Keith Richards’ life, who says in the film when questioned for details of their illustrious history, “You’d have to ask Bill Wyman.”
The documentary is insightful for this reason: it’s the story of the Stones as told by the guy who wasn’t just there but witnessed everything firsthand. Wyman provides moving interviews that detail “Stones-mania,” the death of first guitarist Brian Jones, and Altamont Speedway, among others. He even provides more personal stories, including failed marriages and the brutality of the rock & roll lifestyle.
The Quiet One really lures you in without seeing Wyman as he is today (until the end), and his voiceover is accompanied by photos and videos. I wish the film would have had him sit for an interview where he could recall specific questions so that we could understand what these things all meant to him, but it’s largely a biography for us to glean meaning.
It’s pointed out that Wyman, who learned to archive from his grandmother, might be organizing these memories in order to show who he was to himself; a retrospective of his own life’s work, curated by himself.
