This is a review of “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song”The film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, 2021 was the first time it was seen.
As the blind men in lore trying to understand the elephants by looking at their tails or tusks or ears, filmmakers tend to approach Leonard Cohen in pieces. Lian Lunson examined his career through the lense of a 2005 tribute show. “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” Tony Palmer’s “Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire” was a long-lost chronicle of a single European tour in 1972 and Nick Broomfield’s “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” is as much about Broomfield’s own relationship with one of Cohen’s muses, Marianne Ihlen.
And now There’s Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, a Song.” It purports to be about a single Cohen song – the single Cohen song in the eyes of the masses, I suppose – though it ends up encompassing far more than that.
The song, of all things, is “Hallelujah,”This 1984 meditation moves with an ineffable grace. It can either be read as an encouraging hymn to spirit or a wry plea to the flesh, or both. It’s a bottomless song that begins with the lofty and seemingly reverent proclamation, “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord”It is then punctured with an immediate punchline “But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”
Cohen wrote it during a tough period of his career. John Cale took over the work and had access the 100+ unutilized verses Cohen had created for the song. “Hallelujah” is routinely and solemnly trotted out at big events and on televised singing contests; it’s thornier and funnier than most of those renditions let on, but it has survived and prospered maybe because it’s so easy to underestimate.
“Hallelujah”The film is not to be underestimated, however. “Hallelujah”To sing the song but to also enjoy it and use it as a starting point to explore Leonard Cohen. More so than the 2012 book that inspired it, Alan Light’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’”It looks beyond the song to the composer, which makes it less focused and more repetitive.
Actually, the first hour of “Hallelujah” isn’t much about “Hallelujah.” After some concert footage from 2013 and the song’s original music video from the 1980s (how young and callow Cohen looks, even though he was in his 50s at the time!), the movie sinks into history – how Cohen, a Canadian poet and novelist, turned to writing and (reluctantly) singing songs in the late 1960s.
The early stretches can be a bit scattershot, but they also offer rich details, as in a sequence about Cohen’s Judaism set to the haunted “Who By Fire,”This listing contains a list of possible ways to die based on a 13th-century poem that was used in the Rosh Hanah and Yom Kippur liturgies.
The film is about some albums (“Songs From a Room,” “New Skin for the Old Ceremony”) and skips over others (“Songs of Love and Hate,” “Recent Songs”), and then finds its key moment at the beginning of its second half, when Cohen records the essential “Various Positions”Columbia Records chief Walter Yetnikoff rejects the album, Who has diedThis album was released in August 2012. The album did not contain just “Hallelujah”However, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” which opened nearly every one of Cohen’s concerts for the rest of his life, and “If It Be Your Will,”A prayer is just as important as any other. “Hallelujah” – but Yetnikoff said no, so it ended up being released first in Europe, then on a small indie label in the U.S.
And “Hallelujah,” which emerged after years of writing and an estimated 150 different verses, didn’t take on a life of its own until John Cale recorded it for a Cohen tribute album in 1991. Cale asked to see the verses Cohen didn’t use and created a new version of the song; he used Cohen’s first two verses and then replaced the original record’s final two verses with three others he found in the notebooks. “I did the cheeky verses,”Cale is more comfortable singing about sex than religion, he says.
(For all the talk of those hundreds of verses, virtually every other recording of the song has used some combination of Cohen’s four original verses and Cale’s three additions; we glimpse some of the others in notes that are shown on screen, but they haven’t been recorded.)
Cale’s version turns out to be a breakthrough for “Hallelujah”Because Jeff Buckley also included his own version of it in his. “Grace”Album in 1994 which introduced the song to a new audience. And after Buckley – and a subsequent use in “Shrek,” of all places – the floodgates opened, for good and for bad.
The good also includes k.d. lang’s majestic rendition that ends the film, a montage of versions from various singing competitions is scary enough that you understand why Cohen himself once half-heartedly called for a moratorium on performances.
The film doesn’t turn into a chronicle of who performed “Hallelujah,” which was the weakest part of Light’s book; instead, it veers back into biographical territory, following Cohen’s resurgence with the “I’m Your Man” album, his years in a Zen retreat on Southern California’s Mt. Baldy’s loss of almost all his money to a corrupt business manager, and his triumphant return on the road where his extraordinary concerts were enjoyed by enraptured fans around the globe.
The end result is a warm and sincere tribute to Cohen’s work. It focuses on one song, which might be appealing to the uninitiated. The song “Hallelujah” may be the way into Cohen’s world, but that world is far richer and more singular than any one song, and the filmmakers are looking for the big picture here.
What does the film say? “Hallelujah?” Of course not – the song stubbornly resists explanation, because it’s so many different things and because there’s a beautiful mystery at its heart. “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song” is smart enough to embrace that mystery and that beauty, and to know that there’s far more to Cohen than can be summed up in four, or seven, or even 150 verses.
“Hallelujah”Friday opening in U.S. cinemas
