Ray Pride

Gentle, intimate and elegant, Jonathan Demme's homespun "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" is the height of understatement and the depth of heart. Shooting a two-day engagement at Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium, working with small Super 16mm cameras, Demme's earthy images emphasize the quiet moments between Young and his family of on-stage musical collaborators. (The final number, an unbroken take of Young on acoustic guitar by himself, is a heartbreaker and one of the best things Demme's ever done.) Many of the songs are from his current album, written and recorded across several days before an aneurysm operation last year. Wise and tender are not the only notes: there are spirited. Young's dozens of collaborators on the shows include his wife, Pegi, Hank Williams' guitar, and Emmylou Harris, whose stoic features and shoulder-length grey hair are a vision of immense beauty, and in a duet with Young, in a broad-brimmed pale straw hat and wrinkled linen suit, the pair don't make a couple, but aren't they a pair of swells? And Young's voice into his sixties, this unique Manitoba white soul, singing lines like "I just want to thank you for all the things you've done, I was just thinking of you." No banality, only truth, only wisdom and love. (The battered varnish of Williams' guitar is another image that lasts.) 97m.

"Neil Young: Heart of Gold" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2006-02-14)

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