Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird
(USA, 127 min.)
Dir. Nicolas Jack Davies
Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have a pact. If things ever “get” weird, the personal and professional partners will re-evaluate the relationship. Love is more important than their band.
Growing up as two queer Latino men in California and Texas, though, they can’t ignore that having such a close relationship with someone who nourished them romantically and creatively was anything but a positive. The friends and musicians, who achieved fame in the mid-1990s with the alternative band At the Drive-In and then in the early 2000s as Mars Volta, embrace the strange with their doc portrait Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird. The documentary by Nicolas Jack Davies plays strictly for fans, but it’s at least an alternative to a sea of homogeneous music docs even if it’s a bit of a slog for non-fans.
If this Gets Weird provides an all-archival portrait of Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala’s friendship since the late 1980s. Davies draws upon four decades of archival material with which Rodríguez-López captured their lives. It seems the musician was something of an amateur documentarian. (He eventually directed some movies professionally, too.) Seemingly every moment of their lives is caught on old VHS and eventually lo-fi digital video. The film has 40 years of material at its disposal. It seems that Davies, for better and for worse, uses every frame of it.
The wall-to-wall archive captures the fruition of an alternative voice as Omar and Cedric jam together, play gigs, and navigate what it means to hold strong to artistic integrity while pursuing commercial success. In contemporary voiceover, they reflect upon the challenges of breaking into heteronormative scene where white bros demanded a certain style of bland dude-rock that wasn’t their vibe and rejected voices that veer from the status quo.
The film structures the story around turning points in the musicians’ lives. One segment sees the band at a breaking point. Amid tensions and clashes with fellow band members, their colleague/frenemy Jeremy Ward dies from a drug overdose. It’s not necessarily a wake-up call, but the traumatic episode changes things. The friends struggle to cope with the toxic white guy machismo that constantly surrounds them.
In later years, Omar and Cedric eventually separate, marry women, and have families. But in a fit, Cedric leaves music behind to seek solace in the Church of Scientology. That test of faith, as Cedric explains in voiceover, proves one of life’s biggest challenges as he learns that his wife, Chrissie, is among the women of the Church of Scientology accusing actor Danny Masterson of sexual assault.
The doc then changes gears to focus on the assault case and the complications entailed with taking on the Church of Scientology. All the while, Davies employs the hodgepodge of Omar’s archive with their voiceover atop. Chrissie’s storyline could be a film of its own, but functions here as a catalyst that reunites the band.
On one hand, it’s refreshing to see such a dense telling of two artists’ lives that captures intimate moments and not just the greatest hits. The friends look back on their raucous teen years, remembering how they escaped the scene with drugs and acid trips. The archives show two friends who were each other’s rocks through the best and worst of times in a haze of weed smoke.
However, the finer points of If This Ever Gets Weird simply get diluted amid the sea of material. The musicians tell their story at a relatively glacial pace. Covering every breakthrough, fight, and acid trip yields a thorough portrait, but also an exhausting one. Moreover, the nature of the archival material—videos shot by a young adult on consumer cameras—means that the feature is inevitably rough by design, especially during the friends’ drug-fuelled adolescence.
Rodríguez-López’s eye often meanders with his camera, too—or, at least, Davies chooses a seemingly random assortment of images for the visual fabric. Some great behind-the-scenes concert footage offer archival nuggets, but much of the visuals seem like B-roll filler. The alternating voiceover often proves confusing too, both in terms of following the perspectives. Omar and Cedric have similar voices and their musings frequently don’t jive with the visuals. It demands a lot along such a long, meandering journey. Fans will probably love the unconventionally intimate glimpse, but others may struggle to take much away from it. Sorry guys, but it gets weird.
