At the end of Finding Forrester, just as the credits role and we are looking through the same window the title character had for years, watching kids play basketball, a song begins.  It’s “Over the Rainbow” accompanied by a ukulele.  A pleasant tenor sings after a muffled introduction, or maybe in the confusion of the theater patrons leaving, it only sounded muffled.  The title character in the movie, played by Sean Connery, was a jazz addict, and the kid he mentors is street, smart, black, and likely to be into Rap.  Which is to say, this is an odd choice, having nothing much to do with the movie or the tastes of the characters or anything. 

 

The song suddenly becomes a medley with “Wonderful World”, a hit for Louis Armstrong in the late 1960’s.  I had vague affection for “Rainbow” because my mother loved it and because I used to like the Wizard of Oz.  I tried to learn it on guitar when I was just learning, but the chord structure was then too complicated for me (especially on my brother’s Stella, which featured strings so high off the fret board they cut me when I pressed down hard enough to elicit a note.)  And then the gay fanatics’ devotion to Judy Garland and the connection to The Wizard meant that every time you heard it all the baggage appeared along with it.  I grew to hate the song because I was sick of it and because I had grown tired of its political import to people that could be, at times, really, really annoying.   I would imagine that the image young kids have to the song, if any, is pretty fruity, pretty Muzac.

 

I thought about all of this as I stopped and stared at the screen along with the rest of the theater, something that rarely happens anyway and especially at a movie that missed in the climax and had left folks with the desire to leave at its conclusion.  But like me, everyone else turned and stared at the screen credits over shots of kids shooting hoops, walking backwards to the exit.  It was hypnotic; a song I hated sung with a ukulele by some guy who brought no baggage to the production but a simple love of the lyrics and tune, as if The Wizard of Oz had never utilized it. 

 

Had we known at that point who was singing the song, could see him singing the song, or had known what he looked like before hearing him sing the song, God knows if my prejudices might have influenced my critical opinion.   I suppose posing that question answers it.

 

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole weighed damned near 800 pounds.  He was huge, and depending on how you saw him, gross.  Whatever repulsion to the obese exists to a degree in all of us, he met anyone’s criteria for having traveled well beyond the pale.  When dressed in his native Hawaiian garb, there was certain majesty about him, but in these times he did not inspire the respect that centuries ago might have been his.

 

Until you heard him sing.  The sustained power of his voice was like that of an ethereal presence.  You can hardly conceive of a more ridiculous photo than this one – a seven hundred plus pound man playing a tiny ukulele - or a more disgusting one.  Until you heard him sing.

 

Israel, called Izzy by his legions of fans, was an institution in Hawaii.  A recording star and a personality beloved by the Islands and, apparently, anyone who saw him play.  After you hear him, I think you can say, you are changed.  I was.  It’s a mesmerizing performance, other worldly.   A drop of beauty in a world of over-produced, over-sung, crap wrung from material that I’d given up for dead years ago.

 

I’m not alone.  The tune appeared in at least one other film (Meet Joe Black) and was chosen as the final song Dr. Mark Green hears as he dies on the hit show ER.  In the case of ER, it was clearly a shoehorn to get it into the script just because it’s such a great piece.  I’d bet the ER bit assigned it a level close to Barber’s Adagio for Strings as a way to say goodbye to a loved one.  My mother would have loved it at her funeral, five years after Izzy’s own.   Izzy’s mainland fame came long after he’d died of causes directly related to his size.

 

In many ways, the song is not typical of Izzy; it stands out in his repertoire as surely as it does in our life’s soundtrack.  The heavy huffs and breaths that fat people are required to issue as they talk or move are there on the recording, but you don’t notice them at first.

 

What shames me - utterly shames me, given that I’ve packed on the pounds of late - is that I’m quite certain if Israel had ever auditioned for me, I’d have never gotten past his bulk, and would never have heard the song, the art, the beauty that’s there.  So, in a way I’m grateful I heard it as I did, unexpected.  Five minutes of unadorned beauty for which I had neglected to ask.  Unexpected as it was, and is, appreciated.