Look at all they derive out of being alive.
Youth, George Bernard Shaw observed, is wasted on the young. And rock n’ roll is traditionally the music of youth, though legions of aging Baby Boomers aren’t giving it up without a fight (good thing, too, considering the sad decline of much modern music.) So is it possible that rock n roll is wasted on the young?
That’s a question the often-wonderful Young@Heart attempts to get up and shout about, even if it skims the surface of as many questions as it answers. The Young@Heart vocal group, comprised of elderly men and women in Northampton, Massachusetts since the early 1980s, has performed unusual song choices – including David Bowie, The Ramones, James Brown, and Coldplay – to audiences around the world. Narrated with veddy veddy British good cheer by director Stephen Walker, the made-for-British-television documentary follows the group as they rehearse for an upcoming revue and perform for the confused but ultimately moved inmates of a local prison.
As members discuss their love of singing, the filmmakers seldom get below their wrinkled surfaces. But the film is a celebration, not an expose, and to try to look for anything probing in its presentation is to miss the point. Basically, the choice of rock music is secondary to the thrill of performance. Many members freely admit to not caring for the type of music they perform; an early rehearsal has them holding their ears closed as Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia” thunders around them. The performances keep them going, they say over and over again. They wouldn’t trade it for the world.
While several song choices might trouble some viewers with double meanings that are easy to read as condescending – the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive,” for example – there’s rarely a sense of exploitation. The average member age is a towering eighty, but under the guidance of fifty-something musical director Bob Cilman (himself something of a cross between Dr. Henry Higgins and Anthony Bourdain) they approach each new song with youthful zeal. Their spirits are willing, even if their flesh is weakening.
And this spirit becomes crucial to audience understanding halfway through the film. When the deaths of two beloved members within a week’s time rattles the group, they soldier on. Under the circumstances, Cilman explains, there’s honestly nothing else to do. At the film’s climax, the passing of one member scheduled for a duet of Coldplay’s “Fix You” leaves his partner, a charming rogue named Fred Knittle, to rise above congenital heart failure and infuse his performance with extraordinary poignancy.
America long ago became obsessed with youth, and there’s an unspoken attitude that our elderly should be treated like children: helpless, benevolent, inert. Much of the skepticism raised by other reviews that having the group perform, say, The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” actually speaks to our impression that old people, our most common reminder of mortality, should remain humorless. But the Young@Heart members dodge that stereotyping while admitting that the end is imminent. That’s a practical, sometimes hard to swallow lesson that American audiences jaded from overdoses of easy, cynical “feel good” tripe like Made of Honor and Baby Mama could do worse than consider. The impatient flip-flopping out of the theatre by two teenagers just twenty minutes into the screening I attended suggests as much.
Probably, ironically, the film works best for audiences young enough to fondly remember the music performed but old enough to be thinking about their own “golden years.” If the members of Young@Heart seem disconcertedly boisterous, it’s probably the audience themselves that have the problem. Don’t blame the spirited octogenarians singing and swaying onscreen for being too loud. Rest assured it’s not because they’re too old.
- Michael Kabel
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