Here are a couple of things that happened to me the week before the screening of director Stephen Walker and producer Sally George’s joyously affirming documentary “Young@Heart”:
Nearly-96-year-old Cassie confessed on the phone that she was lonesome since moving to a nursing facility after breaking her hip. “But there was not much to do about it, honey,” she said, adding, “call me.”
And, Dorothy, 92, the most optimistic of my parents’ friends from Sun City West, continued to spin tear- stained conspiracy theories about how she landed in a very comfortable but alienating elder-care home.
Yet the discolored scabs beneath her wig — “my friends,” as she used to introduce them during happier times — proved just how hard she’d fallen and why she’d been sent there.
So perhaps I was primed to see a movie about aging folk and this mortal coil. But who would ever be prepped for one in which they sing tunes from the songbooks of Sonic Youth and the Police, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix?
“Young@Heart” isn’t the prettiest documentary.
But this movie about the “Young@ Heart Chorus” from Northhampton, Mass., is surely one of the most beautiful, funny and achingly profound.
The 70-, 80- and 90-year-old members of the chorus are aware of their own divine comedy. Some wince at the noise of Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia,” a new song director Bob Cilman is teaching them. One turns down her hearing aids.
There’s no song Cilman picks that doesn’t reverberate.
Pop music is like that, of course. Still, it’s impossible to hear renditions of the Talking Heads’ “We’re on the Road to Nowhere” or the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and not smile with renewed appreciation for the human spirit as well as for rock ‘n’ roll’s tender, furious regard.
“Life During Wartime” gains weird energy sung by Greatest Generation-er Joe Benoit.
James Brown’s “I Feel Good” would be a declaration of vim and vigor if only Stan Goldman and partner-in-song-slaughter Dora B. (Parker) Morrow could nail their parts.
“Yes We Can Can,” by Allen Toussaint, has similar problems. The members just can’t can’t, no they can’t can’t, even though they wanna, they can’t can’t get the lyrics right no matter how hard they work at it.
Both songs are on the verge of being scratched by Cilman, who became director of the chorus in 1983. The salt-and-pepper-haired director is a protective taskmaster.
Now in its 26th year, the chorus has traveled to Europe, which is where the British filmmakers first saw them. A dry run before a big concert in college haven Northhampton has the chorus visiting the Hampshire Country Jail, where inmates sit on a berm outdoors listening.
The performance and the audiences make for a sublime — and only slightly ridiculous in the most amazing way — vision.
Coldplay’s melancholy beauty “Fix You” takes a turn toward the shattering when former chorus members Fred Knittle and Bob Salvini return to rehearse it for the upcoming performance. Each had been put out of commission by illness. And whether they will be able to participate gets called into question.
Like the best documentaries, “Young@Heart” has more than a few star turns by folk being themselves.
Knittle, 81, and his wife, Barbara, do an impromptu stand-up routine about how they’ve managed to be married for so long.
Eileen Hall, a Brit, is the eldest member of the chorus. The 92-year-old is a charmer, a flirt and part of a trio of Chorus buddies — including Joe Benoit and Len Fontain — who squire director Walker around in a beat-up compact.
Not all the friends we make here — because friends they become — will survive the film. And someone does remind us in the movie that they aren’t the only ones who won’t get out of this thing called life alive.
There are visits to hospital rooms, blue announcements during rehearsals, tears. Naturally, some of those are shed by chorus members. But many will be your own.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
“Young@Heart”
PG for some mild language and thematic elements. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Directed by Stephen Walker; edited by Chris King; photography by Eddie Marritz; featuring Joe Benoit, Len Fontaine, Eileen Hall, Stan Goldman, Fred Knittle, Steve Martin, Dora B. (Parker) Morrow, Bob Salvini, Bob Cilman and the rest of the “Young@Heart” Chorus Opens today at the Esquire theater.
