The Last Waltz: The Movie You Need to See This Thanksgiving

Unlike Christmas, Thanksgiving’s annual appearance isn’t accompanied by a thousand cultural rituals to follow in the holiday’s honour. Unless you’re American and have pumpkin pie to slice and a Cowboys loss to watch, Thanksgiving can come and go with no tribute, without the ceremony of a Hallmark movie or Michael Bublé album to mark the occasion. But the holiday does have one time-honoured cultural tradition worth observing this year and every year: an annual viewing of The Last Waltz.

A little context. On Thanksgiving night, 1976, a group of five musicians aptly called The Band (known for songs like ‘The Weight’ and tours with Bob Dylan) gave their final live performance after sixteen years together on the road. Their guitarist Robbie Robertson was calling it quits. To mark the occasion, they assembled one of the greatest musical lineups of all time, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Dr John, Muddy Waters, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Wood, and Bob Dylan, among other legends. To record it for posterity, Robertson called his friend Martin Scorsese, who dropped everything to give the event the full Hollywood treatment. Scorsese brought in seven 35-millimetre cameras, renowned production designer Boris Leven, and three legendary cinematographers in Michael Chapman, Vilmos Zsigmond, and László Kovács to document the performance, with lights and cameras all choreographed to follow the musicians and reflect the emotion of their performances.

The result is the greatest concert film of all time — a two-faced portrait of revolutionary music and filmmaking. Like Woodstock, it celebrates the artists who led a cultural renaissance through music, only now without the stoned altruism of the ‘60s, in a country that’s shaggy, rumpled, and a bit hungover. It’s from this decay that The Band emerges, playing and singing their hearts out in one final encore in the spotlight. In some of the cleanest, most expressive documentary footage ever, they give a collage of legendary performances, from Garth Hudson’s extra-terrestrial solos on organ and saxophone, to Dr John releasing the soul of New Orleans on piano in ‘Such a Night’, to Levon Helm crying his lungs out while drumming in ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.’ Every song delivers its own magic as The Band shapeshifts with each guest, transforming from Dixieland to Chicago blues to Laurel Canyon, driving their guests like a freight train catching stray travellers. The range is a testament to what made The Band’s music unique: its roots are everywhere, and the music is a hundred things at once. Their songs hold, in the words of critic Greil Marcus, “a determination to find plurality […] an unpredictable resolution of a common inheritance”. They are multiculturalism made manifest.

The concert is a thanksgiving, and every guest brings a dish. Crowded around the dinner table there’s blues, country, folk, R&B, bluegrass, gospel, jazz, show tunes, and poetry, and you need every item on the plate. When Pops Staples takes a verse of ‘The Weight’, he drops the ‘Miss’ from the lyrics ‘Go Down, Miss Moses’, cutting through the spiritual allusion straight into the heritage only he could reach as a Black gospel singer. During ‘Helpless’, Neil Young abandons his microphone to sing with his fellow musicians all into one mic. And after being physically pushed on stage by his manager, Van Morrison delivers a rendition of ‘Caravan’ so powerful it’s hard to believe he was overcoming stage fright. It’s music that takes a village, music that The Band personified: the composite feast known as rock ‘n’ roll.

Long before its ties to pilgrims in belt-buckle hats, thanksgiving was a feast for the autumn harvest, a celebration of the bounties of the land and the blessings of the year at its dusk. The Last Waltz is just that: an indulgent meal to honour a plentiful season, a final ceremony of an era at its bittersweet end. In the film’s final song, the guests all come together for a triumphant ‘I Shall Be Released’, a last declaration of hope before the abyss. The camera zooms out to reveal a stage decorated with sets from La Traviata and chandeliers from Gone With the Wind. It’s a tragic love story, but one that triumphs so long as it lives on. The waltz continues with every viewing, fulfilling the wishes Dylan sings towards the film’s close: “May your song always be sung / And may you stay forever young.”

Illustration by Isabella Abbott