Jonathan Demme’s “Heart of Gold,” a concert film starring Neil Young, is not just a record of a performance, it’s an example of great filmmaking at its most direct. It encourages you not just to contemplate Neil Young, the man and the musician, and connect his music with his life, but also to think about art and what it means to be an artist while admiring a brilliant movie's crystalline construction.
Shot in 2005 at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry, just five months after Young survived an operation to neutralize a potentially fatal brain anyeurism, "Heart of Gold” features Young, his backup band, his regular collaborator Emmylou Harris, a horn section, a string section and a gospel choir. The set list is broken cleanly in two. Part One is a live performance of Young’s biographical concept album “Prairie Wind,” the third panel in a series of albums that also includes 1972's "Harvest" and his 20-years-later followup "Harvest Moon." Part Two cherry picks songs from earlier in Young's career. The juxtaposition of older and new material prompts the viewer to realize, with delight, how much of Young's output seems to be told from the perspective of an older man looking back on life or a younger man looking forward to wisdom.
Concert films are too often content to cover one or two stops in a tour with multiple cameras, cut it all together and call it a day. Not Young and Demme. They have planned, built and executed this concert film in a way that amplifies and clarifies that insight, in much the same way that a great music hall amplifies and clarifies the music being performed. Shot by Ellen Kuras (“Swoon,” “Personal Velocity”), edited by Andy Keir (“Beloved”) and production designed by Michael Zansky (“Donnie Brasco”), the entire movie is full of small and large touches that strongly suggest that you’re watching the film equivalent of a concept album, touches that play on one of two artistic POV’s, Young Man Looking Forward or Old Man Looking Back. The movie’s physical construction – the selection and placement of songs in Young’s set list, the set and lighting design during particular numbers, the compositions and cuts -- works toward a unified purpose. These choices are all meant to mirror one phase of Young’s life with another, or answer one small yet telling moment with another.
In the first half, for example, Young speaks affectionately of his now-college-age daughter, who's so protective of her independence that he doesn’t dare communicate with her as frankly as he’d like. “You know how it is," he says. "You can’t say much.” An anecdote in the second half reveals that one of his greatest, wisest early songs, “Old Man,” was written as an affectionate tribute to his ranch foreman. The lines “Old man, take a look at my life/I’m a lot like you were,” which previously seemed like a plea by a Baby Boomer seeking common ground with a scornful elder, here acquire a personal, autobiographical dimension: it’s Young reminding himself, back then, that even though he was a rich and famous young rock star, he needed to keep his head screwed on straight and remember what was truly important, finding and keeping love. (“I need someone to love me the whole day through/Ah, one look in your eyes and you can tell that’s true.”) As you hear that song performed onscreen in Demme’s film and gaze on Young’s Lazarus visage in closeup, you are invited to think about the fact that young Neil Young has at last become the Old Man of which he sang, and to realize that for all its craft and sincerity, that song’s sentiments are surely not as profound as the lessons Young would learn while growing up and growing old. 
(One of Neil Young's early peculiarities, or distinctions, was his cracked, sweet, quavering voice, which was gorgeous and unnerving issuing from a twentysomething rocker; he's grown older but the voice hasn't, and now he's finally reached a point where that Old Man voice issues from the body you expect to see.) Demme and Young's structure allows the performer to stand in the present while looking backward and forward. The result is a sense that Young has been unmoored from earthly constraints, freed to roam through his life and work. This clarifies old favorites such as "I Am a Child," from a child addressing a parent:
"I am a child, I'll last a while.
You can't conceive of the pleasure in my smile.
You hold my hand, rough up my hair,
It's lots of fun to have you there.
"God gave to you, now, you give to me,
I'd like to know what you learned.
The sky is blue and so is the sea.
What is the color, when black is burned?
What is the color?
"You are a man, you understand.
You pick me up and you lay me down again.
You make the rules, you say what's fair,
It's lots of fun to have you there.
"God gave to you, now, you give to me,
I'd like to know what you learned.
The sky is blue and so is the sea.
What is the color, when black is burned?
What is the color?"
Demme's control of the medium is so great that he can create powerful equations by answering one shot with another. Consider the wide shot that captures most of Young’s song “Needle and the Damage Done” in an unbroken take. The performer is seen from head to toe in the extreme right hand side of the frame, lit harshly from above so that his facial features are largely obscured. This visual strategy diminishes Young in the frame and effectively obliterates his identity; considering that Young is performing a song about heroin addiction, originally written for Crazy Horse guitarist and future overdose victim Danny Whitten, 
the aesthetic strategy is just right. This powerful image is complemented by the film’s static, unbroken, closing credits shot, an exact mirror of the “Needle” shot; this one places Young in the extreme left side of the frame and watches him sit on an empty stage in an empty auditorium and perform a number on acoustic guitar, then pack up the instrument and serenely exit. The literal mirroring of one shot with another suggests that we’re being asked to consider drugs and music as addictions, one destructive, the other life-sustaining. The two shots also suggest two ways to die, as victim and free man.
As in Demme’s other performance pictures, “Stop Making Sense,” “Swimming to Cambodia” and “Storefront Hitchcock,” it is possible to subject the whole film to this sort of scrutiny without running out of things to admire. A great deal of thought has gone into every lighting cue, every costume, every change of backdrop (check out the faux-folksy, painted “interior” that’s unfurled behind the band during nostalgic numbers; it looks like an unpublished Clement Hurd painting for the children’s book “Goodnight, Moon”). And as always, Demme directs with a musician’s intuitive grasp of the rhythms of performance. I can’t even begin to list the number of times I found myself wishing that Demme would cut to a particular performer at the exact moment that he did. Kuras’ camerapeople are so graceful and exact that you find yourself admiring not just the timing of the images, but their easygoing intimacy. A drum is shot so tight that you can see the scuff marks on the skin. Another number starts with a closeup of the instrument that produces that skritch-sktritch noise folk and country musicians love so much: a broom being swept lightly across a sheet of sandpaper.
You also find yourself admiring what can be described as critical or editorial choices, decisions that suggest how Demme and Kuras might have characterized each number before they figured out how to shoot it. For example, I can’t swear to this because I’ve only seen the film once, but I am pretty sure that most of the backward-looking numbers occur within a warm color scheme, and the forward-looking or present-focused numbers tend toward the blue end of the scale. Panoramic or narrative-oriented songs tend to start and end with a wide shot, while more ruminative, internalized pieces start and end with a tight closeup.
There’s so much going on in "Heart of Gold" that whoever watches it is likely to come away with a different set of observations related to the film’s structural and visual decisions, and idiosyncratic notions of why those decisions were made. For instance, Keith Uhlich’s Slant magazine review likens the film’s Musicians-Going-To-The-Venue opener to the first section of Demme's “Swimming to Cambodia.” “It introduces each of the musicians,” Uhlich writes, “…and allows them a pithy observation or two, but note how these short snippets gain profundity through Demme's compositional and editorial choices. Not one of the alternating medium shots is from exactly the same angle. The cumulative effect, when cut together, is that of a connective circle of experience, one that foreshadows and approximates the musicians' onstage actions and interactions. The August blue full moon that Demme captures in the sky above the Ryman acts as a benedictive symbol of Young's humanist theater-in-the-round.”
It’s no shock that Young and company would deliver a powerfully affecting performance or that Demme would find ways to interpret and enlarge it rather than just record it. But the film's empathy, intelligence and meticulous construction are still breathtaking. "Heart of Gold" meets and exceeds even the most optimistic expectations. It’s close to perfect.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
"I'm a lot like you were": Jonathan Demme and Neil Young's "Heart of Gold"
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16 comments:
Nice to see STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK in there, which on reflection may be the greatest of Demme's performance pictures. My only problem with HEART OF GOLD is the songs, which have a certain inflated pseudo-folksiness that I can't quite get behind. But like Young's GREENDALE, PRAIRIE WIND makes a better movie than it does an album. I love the movie's unabashed obsession with old folks -- Demme can't resist a cutaway to the craggy and gray-haired, even if it's only Young's guitar tech.
Of course this review should have started with one gigantic caveat: If you adore Neil Young, even his newer stuff, this is the movie you've been waiting for your whole life, but otherwise you may find it repetitious or even a bit of a headscratcher.
I could go on and on about this movie (and arguably I already have!) but one other thing I appreciated was Demme's relaxed quality, like a musician jamming along with the other musicians. Demme's a detail man but not a perfectionist, and he lets the movie breathe. You are always aware that this movie is made by human hands, that there's a human spirit animating every frame, a spirit that compliments the musical one showcased onstage.
There are some lovely camera moves that contain bumps and hitches, and Demme leaves them in and doesn't worry that they'll take people out of the moment. At one point we see a closeup of hands playing a slide guitar, and the camera loses focus for a second and then gets it back. It's like watching a live performance. No matter how great the musicians there are going to be a few clams in there, it just comes with the territory. Demme seems to understand musicians better than any other major director, perhaps even better than Scorsese. (Has Mike Figgis, a musician himself, ever done a concert documentary? If not, why not?)
unbearably pretentious comments about an unbearably pretentious (and boring) movie
all that "invites us to reconsider" stuff is just so Molly Haskell.
Molly Haskell is a goddess.
Good to see Demme's concert movies get a thorough going-over. They are deep, rich works that merit this kind of criticism. I fear I am alone in finding Demme inconsistent, busy and sometimes mannered when he's not directing concert films. (At least many of his movies post "Silence of the Lambs" have seemed that way to me.) Something about the constraints of photographing live musicians brings out the best in him.
I'm enough of a Neil Young fan that I'll mount a vigorous defense of TRANS if called upon, but I think he's gotten a little grandiose of late. What makes HEART OF GOLD superior to PRARIE WIND, I think, is that Demme puts you much closer than the album does -- those unbroken closeups form an intimacy that I don't get from the record. I think HOG is, as you say, just about perfectly shot, which leads to the classic dilemma of writing about concert movies: how much are you reviewing the material, and much the film itself? Clearly you can't have a great concert movie without a great performance, but the best ones engage or reframe the material in a different sense, effectively collaborating with their subjects. One of my favorites is Altman's little-seen JAZZ '34 (basically an elaboration of the jam sequence in KANSAS CITY), which takes the improvisational quality of Altman's camera movement to its ultimate expression. Demme is exceptionally good at finding a visual analogue to his musical subjects; I only wish his fiction filmmaking hadn't fallen off so drastically.
Figgis' episode of THE BLUES was one of the best in the series, and IMDB lists something called "Flamenco Women," which seems to be performance-ish, although IMDB also says you can only obtain it on cassette from Amazon.ca.
Sam: You ask when a critic writes about a concert film, "How much are you reviewing the material, and much the film itself?" but I think you answer your own question when you write, "The best ones engage or reframe the material in a different sense, effectively collaborating with their subjects." That's the difference, I think, between a great concert film like this one or "Sign of the Times" or "Woodstock" and a merely stylish or professional concert film like, say, "Rattle and Hum."
You're right that Figgis' episode of "The Blues" was good. But for my money, best in show was Wim Wenders' installment, with the black and white, faux-nickelodeon and silent film footage that looked as if it had been developed at the bottom of a well. I thought Wenders was the only one of the hired guns on that series who tried to find an imaginative visual equivalent for the rock-breaking romantic despair of the music he was chronicling. Even if you didn't think it worked (and I know most critics did not) you have to admire its serene audacity.
Now we're just swapping favorites, but I give the nod to Charles Burnett's "Warming by the Devil's Fire." It wasn't quite as visually nutty as Wenders' entry (which I'm afraid I'm in the majority on), but it similarly used a narrative framework to try and bridge the gap between straight historical recollection and a music which is still very much alive. Probably no one who's reading this blog needs a lesson in the greatness and scandalous marginalizing of Burnett, indisputably one of the most visionary of American filmmakers, who hasn't had a movie in theaters in more than a decade. A lot of his recent work, and the only stuff that's available on video or DVD, is aimed at teaching African-American history to young audiences, which explains "Warming"'s slight heaviness of approach. I'm a priori moved by Burnett's approach to living history (also on view in his Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property"), and it was delightful to see at least some of his work getting the attention he deserves.
I haven't seen all of Wenders' recent work, but Land of Plenty drove me nuts with its pat philosophizing and cheap-shot politics. He's definitely been going through some strange changes of late, and has managed to practically push himself off the edge of the world cinema map. It'll be interesting to see Don't Come Knocking if and when it comes around.
Sam: To continue wandering off topic, I agree that Burnett is a tremendous talent, but I personally thought he started to lose it a little with THE GLASS SHIELD, which felt preachy and schematic to me, in the after school special way that you allude to.
Moving back in the general direction of the post, though, Demme's concert movies could be used in a film class to illustrate the job of a director, as opposed to a writer-director or auteur or some other vague and all encompassing term. It is said that the job of the director is to interpret, and these movies get us closer to that old pre-Cahiers, pre-Sarris definition.
When Demme shoots concert movies he is mainly an interpreter. The music isn't his. He didn't generate it, nor did he have anything to do with the artist's life (or not much, anyway). He is literally just coming in and recording and interpreting, as this article indicates. What makes Demme's concert movies so remarkable from that standpoint is that he really does seem to be adapting his own inclinations as a filmmaker to suit the material, and not inappropriately imputing motives or interpretations that are not supported by the material. (Scorsese sometimes does this in his nonfiction work, particularly the Dylan documentary). Demmie is not transforming the material so much as focusing, analyzing and joining with it. It is as close to a textbook example of directing as interpreting as you'll find. Very humble as well.
rock stars are generally not attractive people. having close ups of these folks shoved in your face is disturbing.
Neil Young is a decent musician and human being. If you like his music, buy it and enjoy it for what it is...even a blind man can enjoy it.
Anonymous: None of these people, besides Neil Young, could be considered a "rock star." The one who comes closest is Emmylou Harris, who's quite pretty for her age, actually. The rest just look like ordinary people. Nothing disturbing about that.
To me the biggest flaw is that none of the Prarie Wind songs are on par with his older songs that make up the second half of the movie. What is great is how well the songs are performed, old and new. I was almost in tears during the second half.
I'd be tempted to agree with you about the "Prairie Wind" songs not being as strong as his early stuff, were it not for the fact that a fair selection of songs in "Heart of Gold" comes from the early 90s, and they're terrific. Maybe Young needs time to settle in your head.
Apropos of that, but off topic, I've been listening to some mid-80s Springsteen and Billy Joel recently, and have realized I didn't give it a fair shake the first time around because it was an era when they were trying new things and branching into directions that were not much like the stuff I grew up listening to. (The synthesizers used on both musicians' Reagan-era albums really rubbed me the wrong way, but I've since come to accept them as a consequence of the period, like gratuitous horn and string sections on a lot of 70s rock/funk.) I also am a huge defender of Stevie Wonder's double album THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, which almost nobody remembers, much less listens to. It's tremendous. So you never know.
Lovely post about HEART OF GOLD. I was there at the Ryman for the second night, standing about three feet behind Demme, and it was a thrill to see all the elements of the performance scattered on a bank of monitors in front of him. Which shots would he choose? Where would he cut? Watching the movie, I realized how sharply he'd been attuned to the instinctive rapport among the performers and the fillips and flourishes in the arrangements—the hooks that my friend Noel Murray calls "the good parts." Demme not only understands the narrative thread underlying the songs, he sees the narrative thread of the performances—like drummer Chad Cromwell's almost filial concern watching Young during the title song ("Tryin' to remember what Daddy said / Before too much time took away his head"). God bless Demme and Young, God bless the Ryman, and God bless Emmylou Harris for calling "the aesthetic police" on the idiots building a highrise that will block out the auditorium's stained-glass windows.
I was wondering how Demme would handle Young's marathon intro to "Old King." (I was standing next to Ellen Kuras' command-post tent when the song started, and a guy leaned over with a watch and said, "This is gonna go on for 20 minutes." I laughed, thinking he was exaggerating, but Young's banjo-accompanied shaggy-dog monologue didn't run a second shorter.) He cut it, perhaps wisely, but I hope it turns up on the DVD. It was kinda meandering and slack live, but when I watched it in close-up on one of Kuras' monitors, it was strangely hypnotic.
Congratulations on being the second person I've met in my lifetime who heard and liked Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.
Mr. Pink: I actually had that album on 8-track! My mom bought it for me because I'd worn our her copy of "Songs in the Key of Life."
Matt: Yeah, I should probably give the album a few more listens before making these kinds of judgements--seeing the film was the first time I'd heard these songs. I am aware of the early-90s songs, though. "Harvest Moon" is great. I'm just not as familiar with that period as I am his 70s work, so maybe I should have shut my mouth.
Grand Epic: Don't sweat it. You're in good company with that judgment. (See above.) All I meant was as variation on what you just said: that sometimes there is a natural human tendency to equate "the best" with whatever part of an artist's output we experienced first. I'm not even arguing that Young's post-80s output is equal to his 60s-70s stuff, just that such a thing might be possible, and sometimes it's hard to see through personal nostalgia long enough to allow for that possibility. A comparative geezer like me has to remind himself that time marches on, and that someone else might see my music as dad's or grandad's music.
This applies to movies, too. For instance, there's a whole new generation of film fans that thinks of Spielberg in terms of his post-"Schindler's List" output, and considers everything before that to be the early, formative years. When critics gripe that Spielberg will always be a popcorn filmmaker, they're not just revealing a superficial attitude toward his early work, they're dating themselves.
But as always, I digress.
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