For all these reasons it seemed that Jonathan Demme had quite a challenge to face not even to mention the drama behind the medical scare that surrounded the recording of the album Prairie Wind. I imagine that the words “aneurysm on the brain” probably were used more in the first sentences of a couple hundred music and film reviews than in all 194 years of the New England Journal of Medicine’s existence.

Yet Demme does succeed with this film. Just as he managed to capture the spectacle of the Talking Heads in the 1984 heavyweight, Stop Making Sense, he also manages to color all of the exaggerated subtlety of Young’s performance and the emotional relationships shared between every musician when walking out on the same stage. In doing so, all who partook in that event during those two nights in Nashville, from Young to the stage crewman who is curiously filmed walking out on stage to take away Neil’s water table, ultimately become characters in the film. As a result the films arcs, dips, and climaxes are based on the inter-relationships drawn out by the glimpses and nods picked up by the patient cinematography.

Demme paints almost an uncomfortably close portrait of Young and his band, letting the camera at times sink as close to Young as an Optometrist would be while giving him an eye exam. (of course the original metaphor I used involved a Dermatologist…which made sense since the close-ups are right against Young’s skin and not his eyes but I guess I didn’t want to assume Young had acne problems and then get sued for libel…) Demme waits for Young to come through to the camera instead of the opposite, there are no quick cuts, and only one audience shot that I could remember. Instead the camera just sits and waits for the singers and song to develop and take shape. As a result there is an amazingly subtle flow to the film where every measure is given its space to fall into gaps and ghostly spaces of Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium.

All of this and of course my first comment when walking out of the film had to be, “there were some strange looking old people on that stage,” followed by “did Neil Young say something about Chris Rock?” (Young does mention “something Chris Rock had said” in his song “No Wonder”) Yet, even these reactions show that Neil Young is completely on his game. The songs and music are vintage Neil Young, all additions to the questions of age and time he first introduced to us in Harvest as a young rich hippie and then in Harvest Moon as a husband going through a divorce. In Prairie Wind he adds to this now trilogy taking on the idea of growing old when the words ‘Young, Neil’ rests on the top of his W2 form. Somehow he is able to seesaw dealing with these universals while staying in the individual moment through the individual experience in which one could even recall something Chris Rock had said during an HBO comedy special.

-Posted on behalf of Yonah Korngold

Previously: Retrohump Day - Rock and Roll Can Never Die

//Neil Young: Heart of Gold - movie site

Tags: Neil Young, Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme