"Singing the Spirit home"... A review of the film Young At Heart, by reviewer Barry Gittins.
YOUNG@HEART (PG) features a mob of strikingly alive senior cits doing what they love best - performing rock songs on stage.
This British doco on a Massechusetts oldies choir has to be seen (and heard) to be believed. The first Superman movie had the tagline ‘you will believe a man can fly’. Well, after seeing Young@Heart, you will believe ‘senior citizens can groove’.
Choirmaster Bob Cilman is a 53-year-old hippy muso who has got a gig with a choir full of oldies aged between 70 and 90, average age 80. He’s got a very cool ensemble backing them and (over decades) he’s trained them to the point where they have toured internationally, they’ve sung before kings and queens and excelled – and most surprising is the repertoire that they’ve mastered.
These relics from the baby boomers and pioneers’ generations are rocking out, with songs from Cold Play, the Ramones, Sonic Youth, the Bee Gees, David Bowie, Talking Heads – it has to be seen and heard to be believed.
To leavent he dough there are several hilarious music vids from a woman called Sally George; the vids act as pacemakers through a doco that can be very emotionally heavy at times. (For example, the choir are shown on a bus wandering aimlessly through corn fields while they perform the Talking Heads’ ‘we’re on the Road to Nowhere’ – it works a treat.)
Advanced age brings with it the dignity and wisdom of choice; it also conjures the indignity of disease and the reality of death. This is where occasionally you would like to wallop both the filmmaker, Briton Stephen Walker, and the choirmaster at times, because the filmmaker places himself in the film as an annoyance and asks the most pigheadedly stupid and insensitive questions, while the conductor is at times rude and overbearing – if he spoke to one of my grandmothers like he talks to some of his charges I would cheerfully deck him.
That said, they handle a 'double loss' to the choir (two much-loved choristers pass away) with grace and dignity. Both gentlemen pull their heads in and supporting these men and women as they rage against the dying of their health – these young@heart singers don’t let the light inside their music die, and they do not go gently
Several songs (and, indeed, the film itself) serve as tributes to fallen choir members. There’s a tribute song in a prison that has the inmates connecting and breaking down at the reality that we all age, we all die and we all have to find our way home. It’s a glorious moment where people from different paths of life give to each other generously and openly.
There’s another scene in the choir’s pre-tour concert where a vocalist in very poor health has the audience in the palm of his hand as he sings Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ – for some surreal reason the song and the singer connect so strongly that the concert audience and the film audience are riveted to their seats. It may be sentimental, and it’s unashamedly sweet, but it’s also got a very powerful emotional truth to it.
The power to love yourself and other people is often best expressed in music – that’s a truth the church has known and practised for thousands of years. And in the best of American tradition, these guys are determined to use it so they don’t lose it.
Young@Heart is a very spiritual film, and I don’t mean that in a limited sense – it connects with both the human spirit and the divine spirit. Rated PG for mild themes, this is anything but ‘mild’ – the choristers may be occasionally sedated but heir approach to life and to music is anything but sedate. This is brave cinema, with heart and laughter and fear and courage. This is simply a beautiful movie.
