Greendale

Neil Young, 2003


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Published: Oct 8, 2008

Our film critic Sam Adams contributed two essays to The B-List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love, out now on Da Capo Press. Read Adams' essay on Monte Hallman's Two-Lane Blacktop here.

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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 his songs has grown so thin that, half a verse into his album Greendale, porch-sitting crank Grandpa Green 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 age. It's a vital question, a challenge posed by Young to himself: What have you got, old timer? Greendale provides an answer. Conceived as a "musical novel" about an American small town in turmoil — Young's answer to Winesburg, Ohio — the project blossomed into a mythology too expansive to be contained by any single medium. 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, with performers acting out the storyline in front of makeshift sets. As the audience streamed out of the auditorium, you could hear them muttering, "When did Neil Young get so weird?"

In fact, Young's back catalogue is full of such odd digressions, like the robotic Trans and Everybody's Rockin', a rockabilly history of a fictitious band called the Shocking Pinks (conceptually, at least, Greendale's closest precursor). After his famously erratic 1980s, a period during which he was sued by his record label for, in essence, not sounding enough like himself, Young reclaimed the mantle of guitar hero in the 1990s, stretching his shaggy-dog jams to the point of self-parody. (In concert, a single song could last over half an hour.)

With Greendale, Young did his best to wipe the slate clean. In a musical echo of the Dogme95 manifesto, he further streamlined the bare-bones Crazy Horse, leaving out rhythm guitarist Frank Sampedro, and scrambled his studio crew, bumping each member up a notch so that he'd be too busy learning the ropes to develop any bad habits.

The result, unfortunately, still sounded like a prototypical Neil Young album, with Young's worn-out maxims thrown into stark relief by the stripped-down production. Young's before-the-fall vision of small-town life was comically anachronistic, and the final image of a town rising up to fight corporate evil felt like a holdover from Young's hippie days. The irony of Young's performing such songs on a tour booked largely in Clear Channel venues was a killer, and the use of actors to recreate scenes from the songs was merely laughable, as they flailed their arms in an attempt to be seen "talking" hundreds of rows away.

But on film, Greendale finds its ideal form. The stage actors were Young's puppets, but onscreen the same performers seem to think for themselves, even though they're only lip-synching Young's vocals. When a song breaks in the middle of a line of dialogue, you can actually see the actors thinking, as if they're coming up with what to say next — an astonishing feat, given that the actors are nonprofessionals, mostly Young's friends and neighbors. When 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, a reaction Young's weakness for rhetoric is bound to prompt sooner or later.

Although the movie upgrades the stage show's rickety sets, it has touches of ostentatious falsehood, like the haphazardly pasted-on headlines in Grandpa's newspaper. But its 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 desaturated DV of Lars von Trier's dour Dogville (2003), Greendale's photography positively aches with love for the landscape it depicts, golf-ball grain and all.

Evocative as its visual fuzziness is, Greendale's lack of focus serves Young less well when it comes to the 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). 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 Young's media bugaboo, deprive people of the right to write their own stories.

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 Haliburton-ish government connections are hinted at by the CNN-style crawl that accompanies the 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. Here both movie and songs become incoherent, not least because Greendale's budget obviously didn't include funds for location shooting in Alaska. But Sun apparently assembles some sort of revolution-cum-theater production, 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 in 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 1960s 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 3D mix of the album's sound puts Young's vocals front and center when he's singing dialogue, but it 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.