Young @ Heart (2007)

Directed by: Stephen Walker, Sally George

**

There are moments during Young @ Heart that really make you feel something. In other words, they are moving. There are more moments however when the film really tries to dupe its audience into feeling something.  This may make me seem insensitive since the film is about a group of old people who spend their wonder years singing rock songs despite their many of their failing healths. They sing to convicts at a prison and because they rise and clap we're supposed to feel like the old people are so moving. Basically what the film is saying is that normally criminals can't feel things.

In a way I'm being too hard on this movie because the story is real. These people really are sacrificing their health and on occasion risking their lives because the understand they are old and have little time left and they want to spend it doing something they love.  Whether or not this particular story touched a nerve for me is somewhat irrelevant because, again its real and it wouldn't have been appropriate to make it into something its not.  The bigger problems with this film are in the way that its made. It moves almost slower than its characters, its longer than their lives and its poorly shot.

To capture any kind of emotion surrounding what the Young @ Heart chorus does, there needs to be an intimate feel to it. The static hand held shots combined with too many cuts really takes you out of the moments.  Spending the majority of the film listening to the chorus rehearse was just loud and kind of annoying.  Its one thing to hear how they start with a song and how polished it becomes once they've rehearsed it a lot, its obnoxious to hear them rehearse over and over and over again. I spent most of the film waiting to listen to all of them sing at this highly touted concert when I was certain I'd be surprised at how good they were. The concert finally arrived after much waiting and yes they were good and their rendition of Coldplay's "Fix You" was moving and "I Feel Good" was funny and exciting. As expected, the end was worth waiting for. It wasn't worth waiting so long for though.

I really felt like Young @ Heart was a very nice group of people that gathered to do something they love. What it isn't, is something a camera should be in front of... at least not this particular camera. The intimacy of what they do was lost and any emotion I would have wanted to get out of this film clearly must have happened off camera because interviews within the film and its external reviews suggest that its really, really moving and touching.