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The audience comes to life with the first beats of the unexpected.

Young at Heart

An Illusion Review by Joan Ellis

            “Young at Heart” is a mirthful answer to a big question: what do I do when I’m old? We aren’t talking advanced middle age in this documentary; we’re talking old. And we aren’t talking about a hobby; it’s all about passion and work and structure, and there aren’t too many activities that offer that combination to old people.

            Young at Heart is the name of a chorus of 24 people from 75 – 94 who live in Northampton, MA and tour the U.S. and Europe singing under the direction of an extraordinary younger man named Bob Cilman. With an inexplicable mix of energy and compassion, Cilman has created a focus for these people that gives them a chance to be excited about living. He makes big demands on their time and talent because he understands their commitment to the chorus is their lifeline. He asks them to work hard, and there is no hint of condescension in his efforts.

            With a concert date six weeks off, they are learning “Schizophrenia,” a song from the punk band “Sonic Youth;” try Coldplay and Talking Heads and a potential spirit buster where, at a fast clip, the word “can” is repeated 71 times. The goal of the group is not fine choral singing, but the fellowship of friends dedicated to learning new musical rhythms rarely associated with their age group. Their audiences come to life with the first beats of the unexpected.

            Genuine laughter is a primary ingredient in the chemistry of the group. The movie audience is won by the remarkable wit of the singers as they navigate the rapid fire lyrics of jazz and rock. They obviously love rehearsals for which they are on time in all kinds of weather. When sadness hits, and it does in the natural course of things, the loss is on some level an expected loss. But it is still the loss of a friend and colleague they have come to know very well through rehearsal, performance, and travel.

            British documentary filmmaker Stephen Walker explores the chemistry in non-intrusive interviews with the singers. Neither chemotherapy, nor chest pain, nor an oxygen canister keeps them from rehearsals. “Why do you keep coming?” Answer: “I love what I’m doing. That’s what my life is now – singing.” They sing in cars, in busses, in concert halls, and, in an especially moving scene, in a prison.

            If one answer to old age is discovering what you love to do, another is the beauty of acceptance. These people are beyond annoyance or judgment. Frailty surrounds them, but so does good will. There is little pettiness among them and no complaint at all. When we watch Eileen Hall, at 94, studying her music in large print with a magnifying glass at home and finally belting out “Yes, I can, can , can” 71 times on stage we realize that the hardest to find and most valuable enhancement of old age is work.
 

December 10th, 2007

The perspective now developing on the last eight years has created a fury in parts of the electorate that surpasses even the anger generated by Richard Nixon and his multiple felonies or Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War.

We are trapped in the fifth year of a war started by a president and vice-president who lied to the American people about why it was necessary while linking it in an unconscionable way to 9/11 – an extension and justification of sorts of their newly minted War on Terror. George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to invade Iraq. Now, five years later we are still blowing up bridges and buildings in that country and then rebuilding them with American companies hired at taxpayers’ expense. Why are we still in Iraq? Because civil war will break out if we leave? This war will end in a bloodbath of our creation whenever we leave. To bring democracy to Iraq? It is a concept so alien to the Middle East that is an embarrassment every time George Bush even mentions it.

Our country, untouched by the hideous cost of this war in lives and resources, goes merrily on living in a toxic culture that has spawned a profusion of luxury goods – houses at $15,000,000, handbags at $29,000 – a market catering to obscenely paid corporate executives, entertainers, hedge fund managers, and international visitors. Don’t dare answer that those salaries are simply what the market will bear and that whatever the market will bear is fair. Eighteen year old kids are...

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Tarek disappears behind the steel doors and security cameras of our new national fear.

The Visitor

An Illusion Review by Joan Ellis

            At last, in this dismal spring, a good movie. Leading a small and gifted cast, actor Richard Jenkins infuses “The Visitor” with extraordinary subtlety and he does it in a role that most actors would have handled with exaggeration. There is no overkill here. Under the direction of Tom McCarthy who also wrote the script, Jenkins has created a character we believe.

            So conditioned are we to Hollywood theatrics that we wait for the drama of full blown redemption or transcendence. Don’t wait; just settle in with Professor Walter Vail (Richard Jenkins) and watch a real life unfold. Vail teaches one course in economics at a Connecticut college while writing his fourth book. In every respect he is uninspired, often gruff in his private solitude. He walks the campus alone and is equally alone in a group of colleagues at a meeting or in the dining hall. When he lost the wife he loved, a classical pianist, he also lost his energy and his spirit.

            When Walter goes to New York to deliver a colleague’s paper, he heads for the apartment he seldom uses and is surprised to find a couple who rented his place from a con man. Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is a musician from Syria, Zainab (Sanai Gurira), a jewelry maker from Senegal. Because we know Walter Vail well from the first third of the movie, we are ready to watch him warm slowly to the young couple he invites to stay on in his apartment. As he takes African drum lessons from Tarek and drums with him on the streets of New York, he comes slowly, ever so slowly, alive. Walter at last expresses himself in a place a world apart from his classroom in the college where he taught for twenty years.

            In a grim but credible example of what has happened since 9/11, Tarek becomes an innocent victim of the new immigration policy of “take your prisoner, no explanation necessary.” Tarek disappears behind the sliding steel doors and security cameras of our new national fear. Turned away repeatedly at the detention center when he asks questions, Walter, the quiet academic, hits a personal turning point, wheels around and, in the absence of a channel upward, unleashes his anger at the receptionist.

            The final third of the movie revolves around Tarek’s mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass) who arrives from Michigan in search of her son. The relationship that develops between Mouna and Walter Vail is a beautiful story of love and compassion. Not one of the actors in this lovely movie breaks the consistent tone of private silence that Richard Jenkins and director Tom McCarthy set at the outset. In quiet resignation, Jenkins says and does everything with understatement. It took me by surprise, but if you can leave your conditioned expectations of emotional fireworks at home, you too will be rewarded with the essence of first rate acting.
 

HUNTING VIDEOS 

When you stand clueless in the video store, try these.  They won’t insult your intelligence.