I don't think I would have loved or even *get* "Rachel Getting Married" if I had not watched director Jonathan Demme's 2006 documentary film "Neil Young: Heart of Gold."
It was pure chance. Earlier this year I was running out of movies to see on my Netflix queue and just happened to remember a rave review I had heard on NPR about "Neil Young: Heart of Gold."
I did not know anything about Neil Young's music and his life beyond the name. I almost never watch concert videos. Music documentaries are not my thing. The first 20 minutes of the documentary bored me --- It was supposed to be about Young's reflections about life and mortality after recovering a brain aneurysm that almost killed him, but the film barely mentioned it. There was no heart-squeezing drama, no gut-wrenching confessions, no earth-shattering revelations, no life-altering enlightenment. Just music. And not even my kind of music --- his songs are mostly folk, a bit country, a bit improvisational. I almost turned it off and mailed back the DVD.
But somehow I stuck with it. Slowly the film sucked me in. By the end I was weeping like a baby with tears streaming down my face and my eyes massively swollen. As often as I cry during movies, such reaction was still rare.
I don't think I can explain what it is in Neil Young and in Jonathan Demme that pushed a certain button in me. It is a specific, personal kind of button. It is either your cup of tea or it is not. The only way to find out is to watch it and listen.
After the brush with death, Young wrote a number of songs as the "Prairie Wind" collection and performed them with friends, including Emmy Lou Harris, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2005. Demme shot the two-day concert and made the documentary film out of the footage. The film is almost entirely the performance, including Young's chatters with the audience.
There is something in these songs, the music and the lyrics Young wrote and the vulnerability and warmth in his voice, that touched me. It is a deep and pure humanity, clear and high as the autumn sky. It is an utterly unabashed and tough emotions, true and generous.
This humanity and emotions poured out from Young and his friends on stage into the hearts of the audience in Ryman, and into the viewer --- me --- through Demme's clear and unwavering camera eye on their faces, faces that told the lives and bonds and love. Demme must be exactly the same kind of person as Young and his friends to be able to observe and capture their heart and spirit without any effort, any manipulation, any control, any intention. Not one word, one look, one second more than what is absolutely necessary. It is undeniable that Demme was on the same wavelength.
A writer can never hide who he is. His own words strip him naked. It cannot be helped. With "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," Jonathan Demme strips naked to us two hearts, both of gold -- Neil Young's and his own.