The Swifting of Joni Mitchell

You could be cruel and unfair and say that Taylor Swift‘s comments in a just-published Vanity Fair interview indicate that the 23 year-old singer is (a) a bit of a hair-trigger personality and (b) not exactly an embodiment of the phrase “still water runs deep.” One look at those shopping-mall eyes and you know she has a long way to go. But then so do most 23 year-olds.

I was reminded that the folks behind the reportedly forthcoming musical biopic Girls Like Us — director-producer Katie Jacobs, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Sony’s Amy Pascal and Elisabeth Cantillon — are (let’s be polite) greatly mistaken if, as I’ve read, they’ve actually cast Swift to play Joni Mitchell, of all people.

The idea of choosing a notoriously shallow lightweight to play one of the most gifted and influential poet-musicians of the 20th Century almost feels like some kind of sarcastic “fuck you” to the culture of the ’60s and ’70s that produced Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon. These legends (an overworked term except here it actually applies) are the subjects of the film as well as Sheila Weller‘s 2008 book, which is the basis of John Sayles‘ screenplay.

What would be analogous to the Swift-Mitchell casting? Tony Curtis being chosen in 1952 or ’53 to star in a biopic of John Barrymore in his theatrical heyday? Early ’90s Pauly Shore being cast as Will Rogers or Groucho Marx? The mind reels, flops around like a flounder.

Posted at by
  • Eloi Wrath

    She’s alright, but somewhere between her last album and this new album she started to believe her own hype and the singing about the ex-boyfriend thing started to grate on people. Women got fed up of her complaining about dating a string of eligible celebrity bachelors, and men got fed up of her moaning. She should probably just write songs about pick-up trucks and chopping wood and other country things.

  • DuluozGray

    Pauly Shore as Groucho? Genius, that’s hilarious.

    I think Swift is kinda hot, even with her dead shopping mall eyes.

  • DiscoNap

    Taylor Swift may not seem to have a depth of reserves, but she’s got the McCartney Magic Eye for pop songwriting, far ahead of her peers. Listen to Romeo & Juliet sometime, that song is perfect. Weirdly latent pop-rant over. As for her persona, she’ll get there. As a wise man once said, nobody likes you when you’re 23.

  • http://twitter.com/jessecrall Jesse Crall

    I read the Weller book and Mitchell comes across as a whip-smart, icy individual (as you’d expect). Very no bullshit. Very not Taylor Swift.

  • Zach

    Gave her music a try once. Just awful. Seriously, the fact that millions of people enjoy this dreck proves misanthropy is justified.

    • http://twitter.com/jessecrall Jesse Crall

      It’s REALLY grating. There’s a big difference between well-crafted pop (Rumours) and catchy brain implants (Red).

  • Alex

    She may not have the depth and gravitas of Joni Mitchell, but you are definitely underestimating her. She had sold more than 5 million records and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards on the basis of two albums that she wrote on her own, by the age of 21. Not that these things necessarily point to quality or her ability to play Joni Mitchell, but it shows she’s not a lightweight either. Rolling Stone referred to her as a ‘songwriting savant’.

    Have a listen to her song All Too Well – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAiDP_bAR5Y . It’s a surprisingly great mix of country/pop/folk/John Mellencamp that gets slightly brilliant towards the end.

    She’s not high art or anything, but she is very good. It’s a shame that the ‘dating lots of people and writing about them’ meme distracts from her abilities and her accomplishments.

  • chien_clean

    She’s a big shallow product.

  • http://twitter.com/Glenn__Kenny Glenn Kenny

    I love how Jeff has to call his two-minute hate on a rumored casting decision for a movie that’s not out of the development phase yet and likely never will be. Well, whatever it takes to get your rager hard-on on, right?

  • George Prager

    Any film about these singer songwriters is bound to fail.

  • goodvibe61

    Swift is a talentless hack. She won Grammy’s? Big deal. Nobody gets it wrong more often than the Grammy’s. Nobody. They are utterly clueless, kinda like Swift.

    Her albums are pure dreck. Yes, they have more of a sheer pop sheen to them nowadays; if nothing else, the production values have risen substantially from one CD to the next (I’d never call her product an “album”, no way), and she can almost competently carry a tune, unlike a few years ago when she was literally a screaming banshee with zero sense of tone.

    But she is a dimwit, pure and simple. As is Bieber. These are pop culture icons as selected by the dumbed down youth of today, Just this week she complained about the endless criticism of her “work”, saying that critics were sexist in ripping her writing about the various (who knows how many, how can keep count and who cares) boyfriends, fuck buddies, one weekend stands, etc.As if any of it matters, as though there was ever an ounce of human reflection in any of her feeble meanderings.

    The idea of casting her in a film to be a legitimate actress makes my head spin. I guess because it’s at least partially a reflection of how “acting” doesn’t require as much thought or intelligence as we previously thought. It’s truly crushing to the psyche.

  • http://twitter.com/myownhausfrau myownhausfrau

    I wonder if it’ll be as good as Battle Beyond the Stars..?

  • Kat

    Oh, I cringe at the thought – unless *somehow* Taylor Swift has unseen depths as an actress. They would have to use Joni’s vocals – no way can a canary play a mourning dove.

    I’m torn on Ms. Swift. My initial reaction to her banal confessional lyrics is “eh, she’s young and dramatic”… then I remember that she’s 23, and after 6+ years and 4 albums she hasn’t evolved much past singing about boys/competing girls/herself.

    Joni Mitchell wrote “Both Sides Now” at 24.

    Hence the cringing.

    • patroklos

      What’s impressive is not so much that Mitchell wrote “Both Sides Now” at 24, but that she had at that point already written at least a dozen songs that were better!

  • http://twitter.com/jasctt Jason T.

    I’ve never heard a note of her stuff and don’t ever plan to. The new pop gives me such a headache. Something about her feels brittle, hollow, inhuman, unconnectionable to me.

  • Gil Padilla

    Who cares? Hey, she doesn’t like Tina Fey and that’s ok by me. And why would I watch something about Joni Mitchell anyway? You can’t argue when millions are being made. She is what she is and that’s it.

  • laurareeling

    Deborah Kara Unger could be an interesting Mitchell.

  • hupto

    (aka cadavra)
    Mitchell is so sui generis that finding anyone to play her will be a challenge. However, in Swift’s defense, she hosted SNL a couple of years ago and did a darn good job in the sketches, so I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on the acting thing.

  • Noiresque

    I like Taylor Swift. Not her voice (tinny) but the concept of Taylor Swift – a young woman who doesn’t have proper sex, is highly ambitious and dates the most eligible men in Hollywoodland, be they barely out of middle school or old enough to be her father; all the while sending wildly mixed messages by writing bitter songs about her detractors whilst complaining about the lack of sisterhood from Tina Fey-level sacred feminist cows. She’s as weird as all hell, and by far the most oddly entertaining and interesting to me of the variously talented and mocked-by-meme “annoying self-important female celebrity” media targets like Anne Hathaway (who gets a raw deal, I think), Lena Dunham, Lea Michele, Natalie Portman and Megan Fox.

    However, she photographs very poorly, with that dazed look being her default facial expression. She should look really attractive, but as with Kristen Stewart’s scowl, only about a third of her pictures look even good, let alone interesting. She did an Ellen Von Unswerth editorial a few months ago; the cover was so poor that it distracted from the quite good Americana shots inside the magazine.