The piano is poised at a slight angle on the bare Carnegie stage, but basically Winter has his back to the audience. It’s not a hostile gesture; it’s a sign of how much he wants the music to dominate. But a movie is a whole different thing, and Paul Thomas Anderson, directing his second music-performance film (after “Junun,” a 2015 Jonny Greenwood-goes-to-India trifle), has crafted a visually spellbinding movie that’s never showy or grandiose. He frames the piano on the stage from different angles, and he brings us up close to Cameron Winter and right into his emotional orbit. There are stage-eye-view shots of the audience (the four balconies of Carnegie Hall separated by three rows of light), and the whole movie is suffused with an orange-yellow glow, as if all of Carnegie were lit by candlelight. It’s a classical sunset church vibe, and it matches Winter’s music, which is all about mystery and heartbreak, which he sings of with a beauty that makes it inseparable from joy.
Cameron Winter’s solo songs are often beautiful, but most of them move at the same slow tempo, and they don’t have a verse-chorus conventionality. “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” has the feel of a slow-motion song cycle, like Leonard Cohen’s first album. The movie might have been a touch lugubrious if it weren’t for that voice of his, which is a miraculous instrument: indie in a low-slung operatic way. In “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall,” he’s possessed by the music he’s singing, so lost in it that you hope he’s never found.
