Before “Ebony and Ivory” premiered at Fantastic Fest, director Jim Hosking took the stage to offer a disclaimer about the weirdness his audience was about to see. “I feel like any time this movie screens anywhere, I have to be there to contextualize it,” he said with a laugh. “Because it’s hard enough to understand without the contextualization.”
Even at a festival that prides itself on programming unclassifiable cinema for an abnormally open-minded audience, Hosking’s comments were probably merited. His latest film is a feature-length practical joke that centers around a false origin story for a 42-year-old song whose relevance only fades with each passing year. In 1982, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder duetted on “Ebony and Ivory” a pop ditty that espoused platitudes about racial harmony by calling on humans to behave more like piano keys. To some, the chorus — “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony/Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we” — is a well-intentioned dose of ’80s cheese from two music legends. To others, it’s an unforgivable artistic monstrosity. Hosking counts himself among the latter camp, telling the audience that “Even when I was six, I knew those lyrics were absolutely appalling.”
It appears that the filmmaker behind “The Greasy Strangler” and “An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn” was so offended by the stupidity of the musical collaboration that he took it upon himself to make something even stupider. And regardless of one’s thoughts on the song, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. “Ebony and Ivory” offers a highly fictionalized account of the first meeting between Paul McCartney (Sky Elobar) and Stevie Wonder (Gil Gex) as they get to know each other with the hope of sparking a future collaboration. It might bear no resemblance to what actually happened, but it’s hard not to be jealous of the characters, who clearly live in a more entertaining version of reality than we do.
In Hosking’s world, much like in real life, the song “Ebony and Ivory” was born at Paul McCartney’s cottage in rural Scotland. But that’s where the similarities end. While the real song was written by McCartney, who then enlisted Wonder to sing it with him, Hosking’s bizarro telling of the story begins with Wonder crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a row boat to visit McCartney for no particular reason. The “Superstition” singer is in a foul mood from the moment he arrives, but he claims that he sought out McCartney because “music legends are supposed to help other music legends musically.”
The rest of the film amounts to two men hanging out despite the fact that they don’t particularly want to be hanging out. Nobody plays an instrument or writes lyrics, and we never actually hear the song that they eventually wrote. Instead, the two men eat an ungodly amount of frozen vegetarian food — sometimes with silverware, other times with Paul’s Nugget Slide, which uses gravity to deliver veggie nuggets directly into Stevie’s mouth. They drink whiskey, Fizzy Beer, milk, and other libations from a fictional Scottish brand known as Wee Billy’s Big Wee. They smoke “doobie woobie” from Paul’s furry doobie box. They engage in copious amounts of full frontal nudity while streaking around the Scottish coastline, and they bike to the market to find ingredients for an increasingly elaborate hot chocolate recipe.
Some might see “Ebony and Ivory” as a type of satire against a vapid cultural moment, as Hosking seems to make the case that such a simplistic song could only be born out of 48 hours of utterly idiotic behavior. But it’s debatable whether the film even has that much to say. It might simply be an excuse for Hosking and two of his buddies (both actors appeared in both “The Greasy Strangler” and “An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn”) to goof off and cobble together 90 minutes of idiotic nonsense to foist upon unsuspecting festival audiences.
If that’s the case, more power to them. The thin premise doesn’t prevent “Ebony and Ivory” from being a wildly entertaining delight. Elobar and Gex perfectly straddle the line between caricature and making shit up in their performances, keeping a few distinctive traits from their famous characters while feeling liberated to break from reality at any time. Watching their idiotic word games, long arguments in the form of riddles, and naked beach dances would be a side-splitting good time no matter who they were playing. With the right rollout, “Ebony and Ivory” might be a breezy ride down the Nugget Slide away from cult classic status.
Grade: B+
“Ebony and Ivory” premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024. Alamo Drafthouse will release it theatrically at a later date.
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