Elderly songsters remain forever 'Young'
Amusing documentary depicts performers who've let old age slow but never stop them
LAWRENCE TOPPMAN
Movie Critic
Fox Searchlight Pictures photo
Dora Morrow (center) and the Young @ Heart chorus get ready to rock an unsuspecting audience much younger than any of the singers.
YOUNG @ HEART
Touching, oddly funny documentary about elderly New England choir preparing for a big concert. Not your typical geezers, at least from the movies' point of view.
DIRECTOR: Stephen Walker.
LENGTH: 108 minutes.
RATING: PG (mild language and thematic elements).
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THIS WEEKEND IN CHARLOTTE
The Manor Theatre will do more than usual to give the documentary "Young @ Heart" local impact. The band Streetwise Music will play a free concert 6:30-8:30 p.m. Saturday and 1:30-4:30 p.m. Sunday in the parking lot of the shopping plaza at 617 Providence Road. Win prizes from Regal Entertainment Group and get gifts and discounts from neighboring businesses, including Jeffre Scott Apothecary, Peek-A-Boo Couture and Panera Bread. Salute Restaurant will provide refreshments.
The theater is also hosting a canned food drive to benefit Second Harvest Food Bank; it runs through May 15. A drawing for a pair of tickets will be open to anyone who brings a donation, and the winner will be announced May 19.
Nobody fears death as much as Americans. Why else would we babble that "60 is the new 50!" or use euphemisms such as "senior citizens," as if old people were about to graduate from some prestigious academy? (I guess infants would be "freshman citizens.")
You won't hear any such cant in "Young @ Heart," a documentary about New England singers in their 70s and 80s who perform songs by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Radiohead and Sonic Youth. The members of this choir can see the Grim Reaper in the near distance -- indeed, he calls on some of them before the end -- but thumb their noses and keep singing. When a 92-year-old woman steps to the microphone in the beginning to belt the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go," you know she's not thinking about anything but rocking the very startled house.
British director Stephen Walker approached this project with wide-eyed good humor. He didn't ask tough questions -- or many questions at all, for that matter. He merely enjoyed the sassiness and struggles and occasional sentimentality of the singers, and he presents those elements with respect.
The oldsters have a sense of humor about themselves. They shoot a video of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated," writhing and screeching "Just put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane / Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane / I can't control my fingers, I can't control my brain!" A song about drug burnout is now a commentary on the frailties of age.
In fact, almost all the songs take on new meanings. Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U" becomes not a lament to lost love but a farewell to a dead companion. Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," sung in quavery style to a group of prisoners, is no longer about a parent advising a child; it's the voice of a passing generation begging the people coming along behind it to straighten out their lives. Such moments are moving, never maudlin.
We don't learn a lot about Bob Cilman, who's a generation younger than the choir he put together in 1984. The first "Young @ Heart" group sang vaudeville numbers, but the mood changed when Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" became a staple.
Now Cilman whips the singers into shape with lyrically complex numbers such as Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can" or Sonic Youth's dissonant "Schizophrenia." (Although it doesn't take much to flummox some of the singers. The two selected to lead James Brown's "I Feel Good" never get rhythm and lyrics in sync, and I swear the guy sang "I feel nice, like sugar and lice." If beautiful, precise singing is your desire, look elsewhere.)
The filmmaker follows the choir as it prepares for a sold-out public concert, where it gets an obligatory standing ovation. Yet the definition of success here is not this big victory; it's the series of triumphs along the way over pain and fear and fatigue and resignation.
"Did you see the white light everybody talks about?" one chorister asks another who's had a near-death experience.
"No" she replies. "I refused to look." Good advice for all of us.
