I first saw the Neil Young concert movie, Heart of Gold, at the Varsity theatre on April 8th, 2006. I was very excited to see it. I had visited the website and enrolled in the email subscription list which only served to make me more excited. My first impressions of the film were from what I received in the emails; a large, high-quality shot of Neil Young wearing a khaki-colored suit, with a wide brimmed hat and a guitar slung over his shoulder. The high quality paid to the visual appearance of the poster made me excited to see the movie, as I expected this high quality of attention to be paid to the visual experience of the movie. The movie, titled Heart of Gold after Neil Young’s most successful single off his most commercially successful album, Harvest, is a late attempt to chronicle the release of his 2005 follow up album, Prairie Wind, the final chapter in the Harvest trilogy (Harvest, Harvest Moon and Prairie Wind). The entire concert took place inside the Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, Tennessee. The anticipated response, I suppose, is to feed on the commercial success of Neil Young’s third solo album with the debut of Prairie Wind, and cement his status as an alt-country legend. His records have always had the appeal of simple song writing skills heralded by country stars from Nashville, and the soft strumming guitar nature to fit in there as well.
Jonathan Demme directed and produced the film. He is a well-known director who also shot the definitive concert film of the Talking Heads, called Stop Making Sense. I really enjoyed his art direction as well. In the opening scenes of the concert, I was pleased to see the lighting on the set very carefully emulated the colors of the album cover, as well as make the band members very distinguished from each other. I do not know much about lighting, but it was a very well composed picture, pleasing to the eye and full of color. I noticed that they paid a lot of attention to the costumes and coloring of Neil Young and his band members. For a guy that has spent his career genre jumping, the costuming did a nice job of dressing up an old hippy to look like a country legend. They also frequently changed the backdrop to emulate some of the other album artwork, like the inside of an old farmhouse with a rocking chair and fireplace or an open prairie with wheat fields and a train. One cool thing that helped not to break the concentration of the filming from the music was the camera never cut away to the audience, so you felt like you were at the concert. In addition, the camera angles chosen often had one musician performing with a good view of another musician behind them or off to the side, which showed the interplay between artists.
Although my favorite Neil Young album of the Harvest series was the twentieth anniversary tribute, 1992’s Harvest Moon, I enjoyed the film immensely. He played many of the popular songs from the 1992 album and many of his other hits as well. An added bonus was the monologues he would give in the introduction to a song, such as talking about the old man he wrote one of his biggest hits to, “Old Man.” Overall, I would have enjoyed a blue grass rocking jam session with On The Beach material and more songs like “Down By The River,” and of course, “Cortez the Killer” (which was listed in the credits but I swear I never heard).
4 Stars
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