It's hard to imagine a more fitting marriage of form and subject - the five-act arc of Mr Shorter's peerless musical career, and the rare abundance of contemporary footage, both uniquely suited to the mini-series format. Could that runtime have been better employed? Doubtlessly - in the early chapters especially, there's a distracting overreliance on interstellar animations, stock footage and earnest reconstructions. As the film constantly reminds us, Wayne's music paints its own pictures in the mind - so let us wonder, and wander, alone occasionally.
Coupled with an (often) familiar cast of talking heads, a lot of the mammoth runtime is sucked up in worthy reverence, and more studious (read: nerdier) jazz fans might find themselves learning nothing new. Little that wasn't covered in Michelle Mercer's (definitive?) biography Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter. The beauty then, is in the form - in what the camera can bring - which is why the third, final, chapter is such a joy; overflowing with candid footage of the ageing, sage-like, legendary Wayne hunched over manuscript paper on his cluttered desk, holding court in front of adoring students - and onstage. I've long believed that the Wayne Shorter Quartet of 2000-2017 is the most thrillingly intuitive group working in decades, possibly ever - and every second of music and insight is a joy to behold (even if it could have been mixed rather louder!) Beneath the spellbound platitudes, mind, there's little to no technical contextualization of what made the group so thrilling - nothing approaching the insight of the 2013 documentary Language of the Unknown, freely available on YouTube.
It's too easy, too tempting to crown Zero Gravity the greatest project of its kind - a temptation that says more about the length of Shorter's shadow, the wealth of living contemporaries, and, yes, the unique conditions of a home-streaming runtime. But perhaps it says more about the seventh art's recent (dis)interest in America's only home-grown art-form, which has favoured dramatic mythmaking imagery over the insight of the documentary form. Let's hope Zero Gravity's success paves the way for more serious celluloid studies to come.
