“It’s hard to celebrate the ordinary because that in and of itself is not ordinary,” David Greenberger says, referring to his birthday in “Beyond the Duplex Planet,” but unwittingly referring to the challenge facing director Beth Harrington is crafting a portrait of the artist who never sought the spotlight. Appreciation from the likes of Ed Ruscha, Penn Jillette and Louis Pérez of Los Lobos within the film’s first five minutes would suggest that it found him anyway, but Harrington gives equal weight to the people whose names you are far less likely to know in her profile of Greenberger, who found an artistic practice away from the art school he attended with the expectation of painting and instead at a retirement home in Boston where work that he thought he was taking as a side job became his primary occupation as he found the expressions of the elderly in their fragile state to be fascinating and created a magazine Duplex Planet that would amplify their words.
As Greenberger tells Harrington, Duplex Planet didn’t hold much interest for those around the Duplex Nursing Home when he published a first issue, but his friends greatly enjoyed it and you get the sense that while the artist didn’t like art school much, he did make many friends there, giving his unusual project a cultural cachet as the magazine became something of an underground sensation. It’s easy to imagine something similar happening with this enjoyable history of the publication, in which Greenberger would pose random questions to Duplex residents and type up the answers in addition to carving out sections for poetry from Ernie Brookings, a senior he’d notice writing notes to the nurses, and Ken Englin, whose memories of watching Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong live led to a contemporary music review column. Even before Michael Stipe can recite some of Brookings’ poetry, having become enamored of Duplex Planet to the point that he got another resident Ed Rogers to help out with the lettering for the logo of R.E.M.’s “Out of Time,” the film makes the case that other artists could see how Greenberger was taking observational skills he picked up when he planned to be a painter and forged ahead with art form that no one else really had, bringing to light the experience of living through the golden years.
Harrington asks audiences to abandon most preconceptions at the door, including what art is when Greenberger is introduced at his Greenwich, New York home where he talks about freeing himself of the tyranny of time by organizing his scrapbooks not chronologically but by similar imagery, ranging from pictures of people in hats or having their head resting on their hand, and only realizing in retrospect that he kept an audio journal of his life by maintaining a collection of messages people left for him on his phone answering machine. (A rambling call that ends with “Listen, this is George Carlin” is a particular highlight.) “Beyond the Duplex Planet” sticks to a stricter chronology and is a little less adventurous than its subject, but when the magazine is treated as art and its contributors as valued participants, it becomes interesting to see Greenberger’s reaction, perhaps satisfied or not with how its received, but constantly restless when he doesn’t want to be bored himself in putting it together, eventually leading to a comic book version (with a cover by no less than Daniel Clowes) or a band built around it (Men & Volts) where new forms of expression offer a creative spark he may have exhausted in other incarnations.
The film ends up becoming something of a litmus test as Greenberger gets older himself, freed of his main artistic achievement when the Duplex Nursing Home closed and the residents he worked with inevitably pass away, and there’s a sense he could be flirting with irrelevancy as he works on more arcane musical projects, but then again, would it take someone like him simply paying greater attention than most to find the merit in it when age could obscure its value? That there’s no obvious answer for this, as loving as Harrington is towards Greenberger throughout, prompts the kind of consideration that only great art can.
“Beyond the Duplex Planet” will screen again at SXSW on March 13th at 2 pm at Alamo Lamar 1 and 3 and March 18th at 11 am at the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center.