The Last Waltz
A music documentary that reminds us what Thanksgiving is truly about
by Addison Schmidt
As the weather cools down and twinkling lights begin to appear, strung along trees across the Commonwealth, the call of the heart towards the holiday season only grows stronger. But as you venture home—or stay in place—to celebrate Thanksgiving, I implore you to watch something other than football. In fact, one of the concert film genre’s heaviest hitters took place on Thanksgiving, and it’s the perfect film to watch when you’ve finished your meal and need something to rock you to sleep.
“The Last Waltz,” directed by Martin Scorcese and released in 1978, chronicles the final performance of The Band, which took place on Thanksgiving Day in 1976 at the Winterland Ballroom. Fit with an actual Thanksgiving feast, ballroom dancing, poetry and—perhaps the real trademark of a good Thanksgiving Day celebration—lots of close friends, The Last Waltz is a memorial of great music and an exaltation of togetherness.
The Band, one of the all-time great folk-rock groups, posed “The Last Waltz” as a celebration, despite the fact that it’s actually more of a memorial. Although members of The Band would regroup later in the 80s and 90s to perform, “The Last Waltz” served as their final performance as an entire entity, one which began almost two decades earlier when they came together as Ronnie Hawkins’ backing band.
Several all-time greats came to perform with them and mark their final concert, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr, and countless others. But what made this event special wasn’t just the fact that all of these amazing musicians performed. It’s the fact that they all came together in an act of celebration, one that memorialized not only an all-time great band in the canon of rock music but also celebrated a forgotten yet essential purpose of music: togetherness.
Thanksgiving often becomes inundated with commercialized togetherness, the kind that feels manufactured in some way to promote football games, parades, and pies. Often when the premise of thankfulness is being shoved down our throats, the automatic reaction is to reject that premise, rather than acknowledge that we actually do have a lot to be thankful for.
But when I sit down to watch this film, a Thanksgiving tradition I’ve implemented since watching for the first time years ago, I’m left only with a crystal-clear reminder: that what we’re given is what we should be grateful for.
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