They Shot the Piano Player Movie Review

I enjoyed the history of the film and getting down to what Jeff Harris is discovering. It starts as a story about a writer promoting and writing his next book and turns into a detective tale. ​

Anyway, he took three trips to Rio and loved the music scene. For “The New Yorker,” he wrote an article about the Bassa nova rage of the 1950s. It got a lot of attention, and he was paid to go back and write a book about how big this musical scene grew and why.

Had this been live-action, it may have held my attention more. The filmmakers lost me a little between listening to Jeff Goldblum’s journalist Jeff Harris and the animation, which wasn’t all that captivating. I held in to find the true plot being revealed and want you to, too. The narrative is about the disappearance of a young Brazilian piano player named Francisco Tenório Jr., revealing itself. Harris is paid to go to Rio de Janeiro to write. Not a bad gig.

A piano soloist from the 1960s caught his attention, so Harris found out who he was and what had happened to him. On March 18, 1976, pianist Tenorio Jr, one of the most promising Brazilian musicians of the time, disappeared without a trace after leaving his hotel in Buenos Aires.

We then go through a series of interviews that Harris did. Once the music hit the United States, it was everywhere. Ella Fitzgerald sang it, and Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespi, Sarah Vaughn, and Quincy Jones were mesmerized. They were wild over it. What blew me away most was that When Stan Getz performed with João Gilberto, they knocked the Beatles right off the top of the charts. After that, like the mambo rage in the 1940s, the entire world started singing and dancing to Brazilian music. Frank Sinatra made two albums with them.

By the way, Goldblum’s voice isn’t the choice I would have gone with for this project since he tends to be too low and uninteresting to listen to for the almost two hours this plays out, but the account plays out well enough that you forgive the casting choice, especially since what ends up happening is that this beautiful, yoga practicing, meditation loving, dear friend to many, musician who was apolitical, was accidentally swept up, tortured and murdered by a dictatorship. A soft, low voice just may be what the retelling needed. Harris learns that the police were down the street and were of no help. Tenorio was with another woman when he disappeared. Her name was Martena, and she didn’t talk about it out of respect for the family. 

Poor Tenorio Jr. ended up in ESMA an awful detention center in Argentina. ESMA was basically their Auschwitz and not a place you wanted to end up in. The movie goes into horrible atrocities performed there. Men in hoods would “interrogate” the prisoners who would hear what was going on, knowing their turn was coming soon. What happened to the children that were born there was heartbreaking. You don’t want to think about it. It’s believed that 5,000 people went in… maybe 200 came out. The movie gives details you never would have expected from who it begins to talk about and from its title.

Still, it’s attention-grabbing for these very reasons. There’s more to the story, but I can’t stress enough how this would have been so much more appealing had it not been animated.