April 29-May 5, 2004

movies

Small Town Romance

Sketches of rain: Sun Green mounts the Powerco eagle in a "scene" from Greendale.

Neil Young's concept-album misfire becomes the movie it was meant to be.

by Sam Adams

As he moves into his fifth decade as a songwriter, even Neil Young’s characters are starting to wonder if he’s run out of gas. The fabric of Young’s songs has grown so thin that, half a verse into Young’s Greendale, porch-sitting crank Grandpa Green (Ben Keith) sees right through it: "See that guy singin’ this song/ been doin’ it for a long time/ Is there anything he knows/ that he ain’t said?"

Grandpa's fourth-wall breaking isn't just a playful acknowledgement of Young's old-dog status. It's a vital question, a challenge posed by Young to himself. "Let's Roll," from Young's 2002 album Are You Passionate?, jumped prematurely into the post-9/11 fray within a cry for "goin' after evil on the wings of a dove. In retrospect, Young's willingness to embarrass himself seems like an act of bravery, or at least misdirected civic virtue, but even so, the song, and the album it comes from, are less impassioned than blustery. In a nation divided, it's reason, not passion, that's in short supply. The question shouldn't have been "Are you passionate?" but "What are you going to do about it?"

Greendale provides an answer. Conceived as a ten-song "musical novel" about an American small town in turmoil -- Young's answer to Winesburg, Ohio -- the project took on a life of its own, blossoming into a feature film and a stage show accompanying Young's concerts. (It doesn't stop there: It's clear from the extensive genealogy on Young's Web site that a good deal of the story remains to be told, though how much will ever escape from Young's cranium iremains to be seen.) Young was so eager to welcome audiences to his fictitious coastal town that he took to playing Greendale in its entirety on the road, months before the album's release. At last summer's Philadelphia show, the response was distinctly mixed; even after an encore that finally treated the patient crowd to some familiar favorites, you could hear people leaving the arena yelling things like, "When did Neil Young get so weird?"

In fact, Young has been "weird" as often as not. In addition to Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps, Young's back catalogue includes the synthesizer-driven Trans, on which most of his singing is filtered through a Vocoder, and Everybody's Rockin', a rockabilly history of a fictitious band called the Shocking Pinks (conceptually, at least, Greendale's closest precursor). It has, however, been a while since Young tapped into his eccentric side. After his famously erratic 1980s, when Young was sued by his record label for, in essence, not sounding enough like himself, Young settled comfortably into an elder statesman groove in the 1990s, accepting his status as a latter-day guitar hero to the extent that, in concert with the avowedly shaggy Crazy Horse, a single song could last for over half an hour. Young became "relevant" again, ironically by duplicating what he'd done 20 years earlier.

And then came Greendale. Without explicitly saying he was in a rut, Young took the drastic action of an artist who knows he's repeating himself. In a musical echo of the Dogme95 manifesto, he reduced the bare-bones trio Crazy Horse to a basic rhythm section, and streamlined his studio crew, giving each member a new job to dispense with any preconceived notions.

The result, unfortunately, still sounded a lot like a Neil Young album, with Young's fondness for worn-out maxims only placed in more stark relief by the stripped-down production. Young's before-the-fall vision of small-town life seemed unconsciously anachronistic, with a closing scene uncomfortably reminiscent of Hair. The stage's show's environmental, anti-corporate message drowned in a sea of plastic Clear Channel cups, as the actors flailed their arms so they could be be seen "talking" in the cheap seats.

Strangely, wonderfully enough, Greendale's movie version is a revelation, a vision of such enveloping thoroughness that its other incarnations pale in comparison. Always present but never seen (unless you count a brief, unrecognizable cameo), Young vanishes into his work, a disappearing act he never managed on album or on stage. In a way, it's a shame he could have seen the gesture through and taken his name off the movie altogether; Young's long-standing directorial pseudonym of Bernard Shakey notwithstanding, it's doubtful that moviegoers who aren't Neil Young fans will venture into the theater. That's a shame, because Greendale is one of the few American films with the courage to address the state of the world today.

What elevates Greendale the movie over its other incarnations? In a word, distance. On stage, the actors seemed merely to be Young's puppets; on screen, the same actors seem to think for themselves, even though they're only lip-synching Young's vocals. When the song breaks in a middle of a line of dialogue, you can actually see the actors thinking, as if they're coming up with what to say next. That degree of (seeming) spontaneity is difficult to achieve even with trained professionals; Young, directing only his third fiction feature in 20 years, has flawlessly chosen people, many of them friends and neighbors, whose inner selves are alive to the camera. As Captain Green (Gary Burden) tells the fishermen on his boat that the devil walks the streets of Greendale, you can see them rolling their eyes and thinking, "Yeah, right," a reaction Young's weakness for rhetoric is bound to provoke sooner or later.

Greendale's stage version acknowledged the story's faux-rustic simplicity with set pieces that could have been filched from an elementary-school play. The movie has its touches of ostentatious falsehood as well, most notably the hand-drawn map of the town that looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings, not to mention the haphazardly pasted-on headlines on Grandpa's newspaper. But the film's gloriously grainy Super 8, shot by Young and producer L.A. Johnson, is a far more apt analogue for the rough-hewn beauty of Young's music. Unlike the Dogville's desaturated DV, Greendale's photography positively aches with love for the landscape it depicts; golf-ball grain or no, Greendale's poetic vision of American life is unlike anything in a long while. (Let's see if fans of David Gordon Green's faux-Malick schtick come along for the ride.)

The lack of detail serves Young less well when it comes to Greendale's plot. Greendale is home to three generations of the Green family: Grandpa and Grandma (Ben and Elizabeth Keith), their son Earl and wife Edith (James Mazzeo and Young's wife Pegi) and their two children, Jed (Eric Johnson) and Sun (Sarah White). In essence, the story starts rolling when wayward Jed murders Officer Carmichael (Paul Supplee), and the media descend on Grandpa's house like the proverbial plague of locusts. As the news copters circle overhead, Grandpa comes out on the porch, where he's met by an unfazed TV reporter who starts to pump him with questions about his son's crime. The old fellow can't take it; he keels over face first and dies right there on the porch.

The lyrics to "Grandpa's Interview" paint him as a hero who died "fighting for freedom of silence/ trying to stop the media/ trying to be anonymous." But as Grandpa breathes his last, it's not the media's cameras he fixes with an accusatory glare, but the one (at least metaphorically) in Young's hands. It's a moment of startling, unexpected confrontation, the most powerful Greendale has to offer, suggesting that authors, like "the media" (a favorite Young bugaboo), deprive people of the right to write their own stories in their own way.

After Grandpa's death, Greendale settles into a straightforward eco-fable. Granddaughter Sun, who's already developed an obsession with the Alaskan wilderness, leaves town and chains herself to a statue in the lobby of Powerco, whose Halliburton-ish government connections are hinted at by the CNN-style crawl that accompanies TV reports of her deed. Flowing from "Sun Green" into "Be the Rain," the movie's images become steadily more apocalyptic, with footage of falling trees and land-ravaging bulldozers. (Critic Armond White rightly invoked the scenes of environmental disaster from Bresson's The Devil, Probably.) Here both movie and songs become incoherent, not least because Greendale's budget obviously didn't include the funds to move production to Alaska. Squint your eyes, and you might conclude that Sun has assembled some sort of revolution-cum-theater production, climaxing with the fist-pumping cry to "save the planet for another day."

It's goofy, if inarguable, stuff, the kind of hollow anthem that's been paying Young's bills for years. More complex is this exhortation, from the fisherman's lecture to his skeptical crew: "One thing I can tell you/ you got to be free/ John Lennon said that/ and "I believe in love' / and I believe in action/ when push comes to shove." There's no question of distance here: It's Young speaking through his character, transmuting Lennon's abstract sentiment into a call to arms. If Greendale's climax reveals Young's failure to conceive "action" outside the terms of '60s counterculture, it's also the product of a bold rethinking of the Manichean scenario of "Let's Roll." Osama bin Laden makes it into Greendale's rogues' gallery, but so do Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft. The enveloping 3-D mix of the album's sound puts Young's vocals front and center when he's singing dialogue, but sometimes kicks his narratorial comments into the rear speakers. Coming from behind and above, Young's interjections might suggest the voice of God, but they also inspire an equal, more worldly desire to keep looking over your shoulder. No doubt Grandpa Green would approve.

GREENDALE

Written and directed by Neil Young A Shakey Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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