Review: I Saw the Light (2015)

Named after one of Hank Williams’ most famous songs, I Saw the Light charts Williams’ life and career as a country music legend in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The film begins with Hank Williams’ (Tom Hiddleston) marriage to Audrey Sheppard (Elizabeth Olsen) in 1944 and ends with his death in a car accident on New Year’s Day, 1953. The in-between is filled with a depiction of his rise to fame and troubled personal life beset by rampant infidelity and alcoholism.

Poor Tom Hiddleston. As the troubled country music superstar, Hiddleston gives his all and he’s marvellous. He’s charismatic, tortured, and shows off a decent set of pipes. He even looks the part. But his film doesn’t deserve him. It’s awful. If Walk the Line set a high watermark for straightforward biopics about musicians, Marc Abraham’s I Saw the Light sets a low one. Hank Williams was a wonderful musician and a complex man. He essentially invented modern country music. A film about his life ought to be dramatic and stirring, both a celebration of the music he pioneered and an insightful look at the tortured life that fueled it, but I Saw the Light is neither. It’s an inert recounting of biographic facts, barely held together by its star giving his all.

Take how the film handles an early scene where Williams checks himself into a clinic to sober up as an example of the film’s lifelessness. Williams is due to go on tour and knows he can’t be smashed from the get-go. We see him show up at an addiction clinic and witness his withdrawal pains in the night, but only for a moment as the scene quickly cuts to him signing himself out a few days later. The struggle is over. Williams is clean and his bandmate is there to pick him up. There’s no commentary on alcoholism at the time or how this is a routine for Williams—and presumably the staff and bandmates. Abraham gives the scene no room to breath. He just shows an action and moves on, like he does everything in the film, from Williams recording his hit single, “Lovesick Blues,” to his divorcing Audrey, to his marrying a fresh-faced 19-year-old named Billie Jean who doesn’t know better.

The failure of I Saw the Light is not one of directing, but of writing. Unfortunately, the writer and director here are one and the same. Marc Abraham knows how to shoot a scene. His camera is fluid and he obsessively shoots his stars in close-up, as if his camera can glimpse the essence of their souls if it holds on their eyes long enough. But his writing fails his better directorial instincts. His scenes rush through every moment of importance and lack structure. They merely recount facts from Williams’ life. The script also does nothing to illuminate why Williams was such a cultural phenomenon or bring insight into his addictive personality.

Most unfortunately, for a film about a legend of American music, I Saw the Light has virtually no interest in the music itself. It’s a film that encapsulates everything people detest about biopics.

3 out of 10

I Saw the Light (2015, USA)

Directed by Marc Abraham; written by Marc Abraham, based on Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escott, George Merrit, and William MacEwen; starring Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Cherry Jones, Bradley Whitford, Maddie Hasson, Wrenn Schmidt.

This article was originally published at the now-defunct Toronto Film Scene.