Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 104 minutes
Release Date: October 6th, 2023 (Spain) / November 24th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: BTeam Pictures / Sony Pictures Classics
Director(s): Javier Mariscal & Fernando Trueba
Writer(s): Fernando Trueba

He appeared like a lightning bolt in Brazilian music.

You could turn Jeff Harris’ book about Tenório Júnior into a generic documentary with disembodied voices and archival footage or you could take his numerous recorded interviews and turn them into animated talking heads with Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba‘s style from Chico & Rita giving it an energy to match the Bossa Nova and Samba beats of the era.

They Shot the Piano Player is thus two things at once: an account of how Harris’ journey to write a book about Brazilian music evolved into a historical account of the disappearance of one of the scene’s been pianists as well as how that shift in perspective evolves into a metaphorical representation of South American life under an ever-increasing blanket of dictatorship.

The animation is great. The music is better. And the story is fascinating if only to ensure this revered yet unknown artist outside of the memories of legends doesn’t become completely lost to time. It’s a tragic politically-motivated crime like many that we hear about from that period—the majority of which see the US government as a complicit partner with blood on its hands.

Jeff Goldblum playing Harris can be distracting (sometimes I wondered if the filmmakers piped in reaction words for laughs like new scenes beginning with Goldblum just goofily and breathlessly saying “Hello”), but his involvement obviously adds marketability for a subject that might not have gained traction without it. Which is a shame since it is an intriguing bit of convergence between music and politics—another blindly persecuted artist by a totalitarian regime preemptively silencing any potential dissent.

---

Jeff Harris (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) in THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER. Photo by Javier Mariscal; courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.