The subject of The Possibilities are Endless does not appear until 24 minutes into the film. When Edwyn Collins is manifested, it is as a silhouette, as spectral as he is tangible. Collins is bifurcated: corporeal but also removed. The massive stroke he had suffered meant he could not summon the words he needs, has mobility issues and did not recall the connections between the episodes from his life in his memory. Who Collins is has been rewritten yet he remains the person he was, as attested by his partner Grace Maxwell.
The Possibilities are Endless charts the iron-willed Collins’ difficult path towards recovery. It draws on his life as a musician but is firmly about the day-to-day and his life with Maxwell. No doctors are seen and although there are recreations of the episodes from his life which he is figuring out (featuring his real-life son) and though this is a documentary, it is more powerful domestic drama than anything else. It is also not a rock doc – Collins could be anyone subjected to such awful fortune: his being a musician is a side issue – and is instead a piece of art cinema rather than an iteration of the life and times of a well-known musician and songwriter. The oblique opening sections, which seek to recreate Collins’ fragmented persona are akin to Shane Carruth’s similarly themed Upstream Color, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and the disconnected segments of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Whether in the remote Scotland he has chosen as a sanctuary or in London, there is no sense of a camera being present when Collins is seen in his everyday routine. The Possibilities are Endless has been made with a rare sensitivity.
Two extras supplement the film for the DVD release: a live performance by Collins and an interview with Collins and Maxwell, and directors James Hall and Edward Lovelace (each pair is filmed apart from the other). The inarticulacy of Hall and Lovelace in front of the camera is hard to square with their fluidity as filmmakers and the assured and emotive end result. But as Collins said repeatedly when his ability to talk was limited to a few words and a single phrase: “the possibilities are endless.”
