Being a Rufus Wainwright fan means always being somehow aware of what Rufus Wainwright wants in his career at any given time. The son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Rufus spent roughly a decade (1998 - 2007) alternately searching for mainstream chart success and entertaining more esoteric side projects before tapping out altogether and releasing an album that contained Shakespeare poems set to piano (this is, amazingly, his highest-charting album in Canada).
Although Wainwright's most recent album - appropriately titled Out of the Game - resulted in an amazing music video that stars Helena Bonham Carter, Wainwright and music videos seem to have been a pairing that didn't quite match all the time, with a few exceptions.
So today we're watching one of those exceptions - "California" from 2001's album Poses, directed by Giles Dunning.
The premise of the video for "California" is that Wainwright - playing a man with a jersey featuring the word "Prettyman" and the number 63 on the back - is singing "California" at karaoke. Inexplicably, this man walks with a cane and subsequently has to sit down while singing karaoke, so he really has some time to watch the karaoke machine, which is playing a music-video-within-a-music-video featuring Rufus and his sister Martha Wainwright. Rufus and Martha singing the song in 1940s era formalwear and drinking. We also get some Rufus performance pieces with his Poses-era band.
Rufus Wainwright is not really on my list of comedic personalities, so a lot of the humor comes from the fact that Rufus is very self-conciously doing a comedy act as "Prettyman" - getting confused with lyrics, doing double takes, etc. It's all extremely self-aware, but for fans used to Rufus taking himself so seriously, it's hilarious. I'm not sure if the need for Prettyman's cane is part of the comedy routine or is unrelated, but why not.
Rufus is, of course, way more in his element in the black and white music video where him and his sister drink themselves under the table. He sports an amazing pencil mustache and Martha goes to town on the maracas. For a guy that wrote a song called "Matinee Idol", I figure Rufus is having a good time playing a Rudolph Valentino-type character.
The reason I love this video is that most of the time Rufus Wainwright is so wrapped up in being Rufus Wainwright that he spends most of his music videos carefully mugging for the camera with some sort of scenery intended to reinforce his persona. Giles Dunning was able to break Wainwright out of that mold and get him to play characters, even if being funny isn't his number one talent. It results in a really entertaining Rufus Wainwright video, and makes me with Rufus went the comedy route more often.
