Ray Pride

"Greendale" is a splendid example of an older man sent to do a young filmmaker's work.

Neil Young uses the simplest and also the most advanced tools to build a self-enclosed narrative world and offer up a hearteningly pissed-off commentary on the mucked-up world around us. Something so oddball and so personal, in fact, Young's characters--old, young, female, male, in the remote fictive California hamlet of "Greendale"--all sing in Young's voice. It's haunting, and within its eighty or so minutes of dancing grain and powerful music, some kind of masterpiece. It's not for everyone, but those who tumble into Young's allusive, passionately political fable are in for an adventure.

Directing under his customary pseudonym (shared by his previous four features) of Bernard Shakey, Young also edits as "Toshi Onuki" and shot much of the movie himself on Super-8 film, using a small, easily handheld underwater camera. Young then avails himself of the most modern of digital post-production techniques, tweaking the dancing grunge of his filmic image into something even more forceful.

There are parallels in the elliptically told story of the Green family, to be drawn from other work--Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," a hint of Brecht, and Lars von Trier's forthcoming "Dogville." Several days--and lives--pass within the Green clan, which includes a disenchanted grandfather, a failed artist father who inadvertently shoots a state trooper, a comically broad trickster-Devil figure and a contrary figure, twentyish Sun Green. Sun, an idealist-activist modeled after eco-activist Julia "Butterfly" Hill who hits the highway in hopes of saving Alaska, is the fresh-faced embodiment of youthful optimism, and takes over "Greendale"'s narrative in its anthemic, thrilling final fifteen minutes. Her refrain courses with what seems an older person's learned simplicity: "Be the rain." Talking to Young, I ask him why he shows such faith in, well, the young. "It's just an eternal optimism. I think it comes from youth. Idealism, optimism, all those things are there," he says. "They're naturally there. They're put there to help us to make it over each generation change. Sun Green typifies that."

There's something special about the handcrafted idea. Writing, you can pick up a pencil; music, a guitar. Most movies aren't made that way. It's especially inspiring to see someone who's older breaking from expectations. "It's a beautiful form, or medium, Super-8," he says in the tones of the true believer. "It really is just a quarter of a 35mm frame and it's got a look. It makes it possible for you to get into the picture, to enjoy it--the colors, the saturation. I really love that quality. It's not an imposing format, it's almost like it's not there when we're doing it. It's like, `When are you going to bring in the real camera?' It's like a photo shoot, when they use the Polaroid. We were able to be very versatile and very agile to move from one scene to another without having these huge setups, which are sometimes counterproductive to the actors. It may be right for everything else, but I try to make the actors to feel that basically they could live in their characters and they wouldn't have to wait around a long time. They just got the feeling that they'd never have to redo a scene for a technical reason. When we got the feeling that I wanted, the performance, everything else was secondary."

Young says the final form of the movie surprised even him. "It started by me writing the songs. I recorded them all, in order, one at a time. Finish each one before I start the next one. I hadn't even written the song that would follow a song when I was finishing it. I just went along like that. When the whole thing was done, we started shooting the visuals of the dialogue. With the characters. Just for something to oppose the filming of the sessions that we'd done. We thought we were going to cut around it, create a long-form video or something out of it, with me playing my guitar, the actors back-and-forth between one scene and another. We had green screens. But that was all terrible. It didn't work. It was very distracting, going back-and-forth. After seeing the Super-8, that world was perfect. I just loved the way it looked. So we just abandoned everything else and filmed the entire thing in Super-8."

And he was surprised again by positive critical reaction to the film of "Greendale." "I'm very happy with the reception we've gotten. Actually, I was stunned by the reaction to the film. I was wondering if, like you talked about the form of people all mouthing to my words, and the Super-8 camera. I thought it was cool, but I just didn't know if anyone else was gonna. I didn't know if it was going to pass muster. Whether they were just gonna walk out, going, "This is the fucking movie? What's this shit?"

"This is all we get for ten lousy bucks?" I joke. "Yeah!" he says, laughing. "'What is this? A cheap imitation of a real picture? What are these people trying to perpetrate on us here?'"

"Greendale" starts perpetrating Friday at Landmark Century.

(2004-03-10)

Also by Ray Pride

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David Mamet's spare yet bravura thriller about the price of love and politics
(2004-03-09)

Not lost in translation
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Tip of the Week
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(2004-03-03)

Sandbiscuit
There are a few layers of history and subtext under its horse-opera surface, and while this is not quite David Lean material, there's hardly a thing wrong with this "Aragorn of Arabia" action-adventure
(2004-03-03)

Short Runs
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Tip of the Week
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What would Riggs do?
(2004-02-25)

Short Runs
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Tip of the Week
(2004-02-18)

The City That Smells
(2004-02-18)

Edifice complex
(2004-02-18)

Short Runs
(2004-02-18)

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