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Neil Young: Heart of Gold |
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 Release Date: 02/10/06 (Future Release)
Starring: Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas
Director: Johnathan Demme
Rating: (PG) |
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Genre |
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Documentary |
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Running Time |
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103 min |
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Distributor |
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Paramount Classics |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
Among the achievements of Neil Young: Heart of Gold is that it triumphs over its exalted press notes, which describe it as “a groundbreaking union of film and music ministered by Jonathan Demme and Neil Young.” Ministered, huh? I’ve always preferred my country-rock with a grain of sulphur, but the Reverend Demme’s track record with concert films (chiefly that celebration of transcendental alienation Stop Making Sense) is as good as anyone’s, and the Reverend Young, bouncing back from a brain aneurysm, has certainly earned the right to take the long view. And by the time the director gets to Young and his musical family standing around tuning their instruments—it’s right before an August 2005 Nashville performance of Young’s latest album, Prairie Wind, at one of the former sites of the Grand Ole Opry—you get an inkling of the movie’s fluid grace.
In his prickly, excitable Neil Young biography, Shakey, Jimmy McDonough quotes an interview in which his subject extols the concerts of the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison: “It’s just a quality about them, the singer is into the song and the musicians were playing with the singer and it was an entity, y’know . . . All these people were thinking the same thing and they’re all playing at the same time.” That’s what the movie captures. The musicians in Young’s extended family—and his immediate family, too: His wife, Pegi, sings backup vocals with Emmylou Harris and Diana DeWitt—have survived his legendary impatience and learned to get on his wavelength when they play. Demme is plainly entranced by that communion. The best moments in the film are when Ellen Kuras’s camera just sits there taking in the whole stage, the whole gorgeous ecosystem.
“If you follow every dream, you might get lost,” Young sings in “The Painter,” and that’s quite a statement in a world of rockers born to run. But the search for home is central to his songs, at least in this “Heart of Gold”–“Harvest Moon” mode. And “Prairie Wind” is an explicit stab at reconciling the lost and fleeting with That Which Endures. After 9/11, after his father’s death (preceded by dementia), he goes back to “the old farmhouse” to remember where he came from—not to wax nostalgic but to suss out what held him together while so many friends self-destructed. It’s not a soft vision. In a hotel-swamped Nashville that Hank Williams wouldn’t recognize, in a country where the past is being bulldozed, Young’s prairie dreams feel urgent: the plaints of a true conservative.
Thickened, slouched over his guitar, his white hat pulled low, this Neil Young is not the proto-punk of Crazy Horse, but the voice is as thin and beautiful in those upper registers as ever, and the young- man–old-man songs fit him even better now, in twilight. Throughout the film, he pays homage to an icon, “this old guitar” that once belonged to Williams: “It cries when I leave it alone . . . When I’m drunk and seein’ double, it jumps behind the wheel and steers.” He doesn’t “own” it. He’ll “keep it for a while and pass it on.”
As befits an Opry church service, Neil Young: Heart of Gold sometimes veers into kitsch: A dissonance or two might have cut through that homogenizing wash of strings. But Demme is in such perfect sync with Young’s music that even the painted prairie backdrop (and the painted farmhouse interior screen, complete with hearth, that slides in front of it) only makes you roll your eyes in retrospect. While the concert is happening, live on film, the artful plainness carries you along, and you don’t have to worry that if you close your eyes you’re going to miss 67 shots. You can listen to Young’s sweet voice singing “It’s only a dream” and dream along.— Reviewed by David Edelstein, New York Magazine
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