Review: ‘The Sparks Brothers’

Upon first glance, it appears as if The Sparks Brothers represents director Edgar Wright’s obsession with the past taken to its most extreme conclusion. This pivot to nostalgic hagiography shouldn’t be a surprise to those who have examined Wright’s previous body of work. The NES graphics woven into the aesthetics of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the rote fusion of Walter Hill’s The Driver, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, and the giallo fixation of the upcoming Last Night in Soho all see Wright mining through the entertainment of his youth to produce a film that ultimately attempts to deconstruct the author’s love for those things.  This idea makes up the entirety of the subtext found in Wright’s 2013 film The World’s End. The Sparks Brothers, on the other hand, makes no attempt to interrogate Wright’s love for the titular band, instead offering the viewer nothing more than a collection of talking-head interviews of those who already pray to the altar of Ron and Russell Mael. 

Clocking in at a grueling 135 minutes – Wright doesn’t seem to know how to leave anything on the cutting-room floor, including his own talking head footage – the documentary offers an exhaustive look into the life and art of the Brothers Mael, following them from their adolescence to the creation of their 2020 album, A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip. Fans of the band will find nothing new here, as the film makes the odd decision to track the legacy of Sparks less through interviews with the band itself and more through interviews with celebrities who consider themselves to be fans of the music Sparks produces. Wright attempts to subvert the tropes of the documentary by implementing the more idiosyncratic parts of his filmmaking aesthetic, whether it be shooting the film in black-and-white or cutting to various animated segments when an interviewee is recounting an anecdote related to the band. These attempts at subversion ultimately prove futile, however, as they add little in the way of substance to a documentary whose biggest issue is its bloated pace. This issue of pace, however, could be overlooked if the documentary offered a compelling and nuanced look at its subjects, something it rarely ever does. 

Wright’s love for the music of Sparks is immediately evident here, his admiration for the group bleeding into every frame of his documentary. However, this rose-colored view of the Mael Brothers prevents the film from ever blossoming into anything more than a trite bit of idolatry. Every interview the film presents the viewer going out of its way to proclaim Sparks as infallible gods of art rock, choosing to gloss over incidents like the brothers abandoning their original band line-up for England without telling them after their second album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, failed to make any sort of waves in the United States. The darkest the film ever gets is the section focusing on the six-year period that the brothers spent creating their 1994 comeback record, Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins, detailing how their creative drought led to them burning through much of their combined life savings to produce the record. This anecdote ends on a triumphant note – as do many of the film’s anecdotes – with the brothers getting a top-ten hit with the album’s lead single, “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’?” On top of cherry-picking the events in the Sparks legacy to shine a light on, the brother’s insistence on keeping their background a mystery does the film no favors in offering anything more than a cursory glance into who Sparks are outside of their musical personas. The exclusion of this key element makes The Sparks Brothers feel not only insubstantial in the four-decade-plus legacy of the Mael Brothers but in the oeuvre of the filmmaker seeking to bottle that legacy on film.

At the end of the day, the worst thing that can be said about The Sparks Brothers is that it feels inessential. Though it should be stated that the film does open up the work of the iconoclastic art-pop duo to a more mainstream audience thanks to Wright’s cinematic shrine, any value a Sparks neophyte could potentially gain from watching the documentary would be reaped ten-fold by simply listening to the band’s diverse and extensive discography. If The Sparks Brothers gives us a glimpse into anything, it’s the work of a film artist who seems to be drained of the creative spark that elevated him to the pantheon of the great modern film artists. This seeming lack of true cinematic innovation that marked the first decade of his career doesn’t bode well for Wright’s next cinematic outings.

One can only hope that his upcoming Last Night in Soho can prove this author wrong.