Neil's Heart of Gold

The Neil Young concert film, "Heart of Gold," directed by Jonathan Demme, screened to a packed Sundance theater tonight with the director and singer in attendance. Filmed at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in August of 2005, the acoustic show took place a few months after Young had brain surgery to remove an aneurysm. His father also died around the same time, so it's not surprising that resignation, resilience, and acceptance blow through every song, from the new tunes off "Prairie Wind" to suddenly relevant chestnuts like "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold" ("and I'm gettin' old," indeed).

Demme directs with the same no-nonsense clarity that he brought to the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense,” but this evening is elegiac rather than avant-hip. The crowd at the Ryman often erupts into applause and so did the crowd watching the film in Park City, knowing Neil was in the audience but also simply moved by what we were seeing and hearing. At the end of one such outburst, the movie-Neil said “Thanks” in a looming close-up, and for a brief, spooky moment, it was as if the line between audience and film had dissolved. As a part-time Young fan, I went in expecting a pretty good concert film; what I got was something much more.

“Heart of Gold” made up for some disappointments earlier in the day. “Factotum,” adapted from Charles Bukowski’s second novel, featured a surprisingly acceptable Matt Dillon as a boozing, womanizing reprobate (i.e., Bukowski himself) and who else but Lili Taylor as his barfly girlfriend, but Norway’s Bent Hamer is the wrong man to put behind the camera. The director of the extremely dry comedy “ Kitchen Stories” misses the poetic rawness of the writer’s work and delivers instead a tidy and well-shot film about an unholy mess of a man.

I’m a big fan of director Terry Zwigoff (“Crumb,” “Bad Santa”) and his previous collaboration with alterna-comics artist Dan Clowes, “Ghost World.” My high hopes for “Art School Confidential” were dashed, though, by a scattershot script that traffics in true romance and murder mysteries, two Hollywood subjects Zwigoff has adroitly sidestepped until now. The most dead-on parts of the movie expose art-school pretensions and posers – much like Clowes’ original comic did – but for the first time Zwigoff loses control of his dark comedic tone, and the results are wildly uneven. Pros like John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, and Jim Broadbent do what they can in support but lead Max Minghella (son of director Anthony) is too young and unformed to convey the necessary angst. Zwigoff was bound to make a lousy movie sooner or later, and here it is,

On the deal front, Warner Independent bought the Michel Gondry romantic whimsy “The Science of Sleep” for $6 million, the only action in a slow day. As I mentioned below, I’ll be leaving tomorrow and passing the blog-reins on to Wesley Morris, who’ll report on the back half of Sundance. Wesley, here are some of the movies I wish I’d been able to catch: “Come Early Morning,” “Iraq in Fragments,” “Stephanie Daley,” “A Lion in the House,” “Thin,” “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” and “An Unreasonable Man.” All have good and growing word of mouth, but at Sundance, you roll the dice and you takes your chances.