[18] In Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan noted: "Artistic, obsessive and intoxicating, I Called Him Morgan is a documentary with a creative soul, and that makes all the difference.
Speaking with writer and teacher Larry Reni Thomas, she details her difficult life, her relationship with Morgan and how and why she came to shoot him at a Manhattan jazz club named Slugs in the midst of a blizzard so terrible that it delayed ambulances, contributing to her husband's death.
/.../ What makes "Morgan" such an exceptional film is that Collin, with a combination of good fortune and great skill, has built on this excellent verbal foundation with transfixing visuals that set a powerful mood.
[19] In his 5-star review in The Guardian film critic Jordan Hoffman wrote: "Kasper Collin's I Called Him Morgan isn't just the greatest jazz documentary since Let's Get Lost, it's a documentary-as-jazz.
/.../ Though Lee and Helen Morgan's fate is easily learned with a quick Google search, I'd rather leave it unspoken, out there in memory's snowdrift, something strange and indescribable, like this sad but still beautiful film itself.
"[citation needed] Variety's film critic Guy Lodge says in his review that "Few musical genres connote as specifically refined a visual aesthetic as jazz: Alongside those complex, clattering notes, a lot of immaculate lighting, styling and tailoring went into the birth of the cool.
/.../ Sometimes acidly candid, sometimes foggy, but consistently rueful, Helen Morgan's account of events serves as the film's narrative spine — featured alternately through digitally tidied audio and the muddy whistle of Thomas’ original cassette recordings, as if to demonstrate the ephemeral nature even of the facts in this unhappy slice of history.
Collin and his adroit team of editors intercut her testimony with the present-day recollections of a host of Morgan's colleagues and contemporaries, from Wayne Shorter to Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath to Billy Harper.
They're not always precisely aligned in their view of the man and his downfall: Morgan remains something of a slippery enigma to the end, to the point that even his wife and murderer sounds poignantly astonished in retrospect that they ever shared each other's lives.
It's this misty sense of memory that Young (best known for his collaborations with Ava DuVernay) conjures through his imagery, at once sketchy and sumptuous in its portrayal of a New York City just sliding out of its apex of cool into grittier squalor: His street scenes, blotching light and shadow as if painting watercolor on newsprint, can look either as vivid or as faded as the history in question.
"[3] In her PopMatters review critic Cynthia Fuchs describes how the documentary in its storytelling deals with memories and what is possible and not possible to know: "Helen's interview and her husband's story form a dual foundation for I Called Him Morgan.
Layering experiences and impressions, music and image, Kasper Collin's remarkable film is less concerned with history than with effects, influences that stretch across time, ideas that shape art.
For the former, the film's opening with Morgan's "Search for the New Land" will recall his 1964 album with Billy Higgins, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock, and for the latter, the sound may be a revelation, cool, smart, occasionally abstract.
When bassist Paul West observes, "His life was restored by Helen and it was a joy to watch: he was playing, he was producing, and he was living," a few shots of Morgan illustrate: he's older, he's sober, he's working his PR.
In this, the film conjures visual rhythms resembling jazz, montages of image and sound providing new ways of conceiving the movements of time, of cause and effect, of interpretation.
"[4] Critic Lauren Du Graf states in Museum Of The Moving Image's magazine Reverse Shot that: "I Called Him Morgan casts Helen (the "I" in the film's title) not as a coldblooded killer, but as a sympathetic and relatable one.
Like Nellie Monk, Lorraine Gillespie, Gladys Hampton, and Maxine Gordon, Helen Morgan labored in an invisible economy of jazz wives who worked behind the scenes to ensure their husbands’ success and survival.
/.../ The film's portrayal of Helen is also intersectional, showing how her life was shaped by her efforts to escape poverty, motherhood, and the limited opportunities afforded black women of her generation.
She rejected the service jobs typically offered to black women, and cultivated a community of bohemians at her apartment, which served as an after-hours spot for struggling musicians to crash or eat a home-cooked meal.
But I Called Him Morgan illuminates a deeper, in some ways more intriguing mystery: the jazz life of the hard-bop era, which saw a confluence with civil rights and Black Power.
This is a world we know mostly from the work of photographers like Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, and W. Eugene Smith, who spent time with jazz musicians when they weren't performing, and captured their intimate lives off-stage.
Snow falling and city lights in New York; seagulls, trees, and sunset in North Carolina: Young shoots these recurring images in elusive, grainy textures that give the film a moody atmosphere reminiscent of the French New Wave, a movement intoxicated by the sounds of sixties jazz.
They were hardly unscathed by competition, but this was partly offset by a common artistic purpose, and by the hopes inspired by the civil rights struggle, which Morgan evoked in his epic 1964 composition "Search for the New Land"—a piece that provides Collin with his leitmotif.
We hear Helen's voice throughout the film in a slightly hissing tape made by Larry Reni Thomas, an adult educator in Wilmington, North Carolina, who taught her after she was released from prison.