I Called Him Morgan is a 2016 Swedish produced documentary film written and directed by Kasper Collin which offers an account of the life of jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, and his relationship with his common-law wife Helen Morgan, who killed him in February 1972.
The documentary was produced over a period of seven years from 2009 to 2016, including three years of editing.
Among the participants in I Called Him Morgan are Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, Billy Harper, Judith Johnson, Bennie Maupin, Larry Ridley, Paul West, Larry Reni Thomas, Al Harrison, Charli Persip and Albert "Tootie" Heath.
Release
Festival I Called Him Morgan premiered out of competition at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival after being pitched at the 2012 MeetMarket at Doc/Fest. After Venice, it went on to play Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. After Toronto Vox described the film as it "feels like an Oscar winner for best documentary feature just waiting to happen." The New Yorker dubbed the documentary, together with Moonlight and The Hedonists, as New York Film Festival's Breakout Films.
Theatrical I Called Him Morgan had its US theatrical premiere on March 24, 2017. It premiered in Sweden on March 31, in Canada on April 7, and in the United Kingdom on July 28.
Home media On July 24, 2017 the film premiered on Netflix worldwide (to whom it was sold during the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival), except in the UK and Sweden. The UK premiere was on August 8, 2017. I Called Him Morgan was for a long time one of the 15 best reviewed movies on Netflix according to Metacritic. After the releases of the acclaimed movies The Irishman and Marriage Story, I Called Him Morgan is the 18th best reviewed of all movies on Netflix.Metascore of all Netflix movies at Metacritic
Reception
There are 20 reviews registered at Metacritic. Eight of them are registered as 100/100, and the film has a score of 90 out of 100. On July 1, 2017, Metacritic announced the film as the best reviewed movie of the first half of 2017. By the end of the year it ended up as the 7th best reviewed movie and the third best reviewed documentary of 2017 based on its Metacritic score
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 96% score based on 52 reviews. The site's consensus states: "I Called Him Morgan doubles as a seductive tribute to its subject's jazz passion as well as an absorbing look at a fatally doomed relationship".
In his New York Times review A.O. Scott called the film "a delicate human drama about love, ambition and the glories of music".
In Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan noted: "Artistic, obsessive and intoxicating, I Called Him Morgan is a documentary with a creative soul, and that makes all the difference. /.../ Using a dazzling blend of cinematic tools, aural as well as visual, Collin recreates both individual lives and an entire world. As a slice of recovered and illuminated time, I Called Him Morgan has few peers. /.../ The film's centerpiece interview is an arresting one-of-a-kind narrative that Helen Morgan herself recorded on a cassette-tape recorder a month before she died. Speaking with writer and teacher Larry Reni Thomas, she details her difficult life, her relationship with Morgan and how and why she came to shoot him at a Manhattan jazz club named Slugs in the midst of a blizzard so terrible that it delayed ambulances, contributing to her husband's death. /.../ What makes "Morgan" such an exceptional film is that Collin, with a combination of good fortune and great skill, has built on this excellent verbal foundation with transfixing visuals that set a powerful mood. /.../ Regardless of whether you care deeply about jazz, the poetry of Collin's filmmaking and the poignancy of the couple's story will win you over. As a piece of history and a personal journey, I Called Him Morgan is cinema to cherish.
In his 5-star review in The Guardian film critic Jordan Hoffman wrote: "Kasper Collin's I Called Him Morgan isn't just the greatest jazz documentary since Let's Get Lost, it's a documentary-as-jazz. Spellbinding, mercurial, hallucinatory, exuberant, tragic /.../ I Called Him Morgan is far from a traditional documentary. Its story-within-a-story begins with a 2013 interview with Larry Reni Thomas, a North Carolina teacher who just so happens to be a legendary jazz DJ. In the mid 1990s, as he was greeting new students in an adult education class, he realized his new pupil (nearing age 70) was Helen Morgan, Lee's widow. In 1996 Thomas sat down with an inexpensive tape recorder and asked her questions. A month later she died. Collin turns to that plain, unlabeled white tape, marred by squeaks and hisses, and from it emerges the ghost of a voice. /.../ Though Lee and Helen Morgan's fate is easily learned with a quick Google search, I'd rather leave it unspoken, out there in memory's snowdrift, something strange and indescribable, like this sad but still beautiful film itself."
Variety's film critic Guy Lodge says in his review that "Few musical genres connote as specifically refined a visual aesthetic as jazz: Alongside those complex, clattering notes, a lot of immaculate lighting, styling and tailoring went into the birth of the cool. So it's fitting that Kasper Collin's excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage. /.../ Sometimes acidly candid, sometimes foggy, but consistently rueful, Helen Morgan's account of events serves as the film's narrative spine — featured alternately through digitally tidied audio and the muddy whistle of Thomas’ original cassette recordings, as if to demonstrate the ephemeral nature even of the facts in this unhappy slice of history. Collin and his adroit team of editors intercut her testimony with the present-day recollections of a host of Morgan's colleagues and contemporaries, from Wayne Shorter to Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath to Billy Harper. They're not always precisely aligned in their view of the man and his downfall: Morgan remains something of a slippery enigma to the end, to the point that even his wife and murderer sounds poignantly astonished in retrospect that they ever shared each other's lives. It's this misty sense of memory that Young (best known for his collaborations with Ava DuVernay) conjures through his imagery, at once sketchy and sumptuous in its portrayal of a New York City just sliding out of its apex of cool into grittier squalor: His street scenes, blotching light and shadow as if painting watercolor on newsprint, can look either as vivid or as faded as the history in question. Content may be king in non-fiction filmmaking, and Collin has assembled a great deal here. But it's the elegant melancholy of the film's visuals, in complete sympathy with the most wistful cuts of its subject's discography, that burnishes both the information we have and the gaps in it. "I couldn't have did this, this must be a dream," Helen Morgan says of her crime; by the end of this deeply sad, sensuous portrait, you almost think it was."
In the Wall Street Journal, film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote in his review that "Musicians sometimes paraphrase Debussy, or one another, in saying that music is the silence between the notes. I Called Him Morgan has it all—the notes and the silence, plus the music of spoken language, pitched in rueful tones of recollection."
And in the Village Voice critic Alan Scher Stuhl notes: "It's fitting that one of the great films about jazz centers on the re-creation of a moment. /.../ Collin and company are after climate, not weather. They steep us in our awareness that Morgan and his New York have been lost, that our glimpses of it must either be through memory or hazed-up photography — or the music itself."
In her PopMatters review critic Cynthia Fuchs describes how the documentary in its storytelling deals with memories and what is possible and not possible to know: "Helen's interview and her husband's story form a dual foundation for I Called Him Morgan. Layering experiences and impressions, music and image, Kasper Collin's remarkable film is less concerned with history than with effects, influences that stretch across time, ideas that shape art. /.../ Some viewers may be familiar with Lee Morgan's career and celebrated talent, and others may not know how profoundly he shaped American jazz. For the former, the film's opening with Morgan's "Search for the New Land" will recall his 1964 album with Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock, and for the latter, the sound may be a revelation, cool, smart, occasionally abstract. The track plays over a scene that appears abstract as well, snow falling against a gray sky, a seeming negative image that makes the snow look like ash. The snow looks forward and back, to the day when Helen shot Lee in a New York club calls Slug's, open that night in February 1972 despite a blizzard. "Search for the New Land" gives way to saxophonist Billy Harper's recollection: "I just couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to think, because they were always together." Harper's response to Morgan's death echoes many you'll hear in the film, from other associates like bass player Jymie Merritt or saxophonist Wayne Shorter, artists whose lives were touched by Morgan, and Helen too. "I heard police had arrested her and taken her to jail," says Bennie Maupin. "And, you know, I never saw her again." That sense of loss lingers throughout the film. Morgan and Helen first appear on screen as a photo, held in Harper's hand. Morgan's back is to the camera, and he's looking into a brick-walled kitchen, where Helen sits at a table, lighting a cigarette. This photo and others create a sort of visual backbone for the film, frozen moments of their life together. /.../ Such stills—alongside some black and footage of performances, with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Morgan's own bands—offer glimpses of Morgan and Helen's stories, but only that. Collin's film fills in the gaps for which it has no visual records with carefully selected abstractions, the snow and the cows, city streets, blurred traffic lights, New York City bridges and building exteriors. Brief looks at fire escapes and windows suggest times long past but lingering, desires to look inside, to understand. As much as the interview subjects who knew Helen and Morgan tell their versions of what happened, none has details about how the relationship began or shifted. When bassist Paul West observes, "His life was restored by Helen and it was a joy to watch: he was playing, he was producing, and he was living," a few shots of Morgan illustrate: he's older, he's sober, he's working his PR. As these images help you to imagine what people describe, they also remind you of what you don't see. /.../ In exposing and making sense of the fragments and fault lines of memories, I Called Him Morgan tells the stories of Helen and Morgan—how they met, how they worked together, how they appeared to others. It also tells a story of storytelling, how different strands come together and fall apart, how listeners participate in that process. In this, the film conjures visual rhythms resembling jazz, montages of image and sound providing new ways of conceiving the movements of time, of cause and effect, of interpretation. As it articulates loss, the movie also contemplates understanding."
Critic Lauren Du Graf states in Museum Of The Moving Image's magazine Reverse Shot that: