Greendale

BY JAN STUART | STAFF WRITER

March 19, 2004

(U). Neil Young & Crazy Horse thematic album is the basis of this clunky musical portrait of one American family, photographed and directed by Young. 1:15. Landmark Sunshine, Manhattan.

If you close your eyes at any time during "Greendale," the celluloid contraption Neil Young has assembled from his new recording of the same name, you will feel as if time has stopped. Pushing 60, he remains forever Young: cranking out new songs that could have been written 30 years ago, crooning with that wobbly wisp of a voice that teeters between a Tiny Tim falsetto and a Lou Reed shrug.

That said, anyone who truly cares for Young might prefer to catch him on his latest American tour or hunker down with the CD. "Greendale" is the kind of misbegotten artistic detour that rock singers sometimes indulge in when they think they could go their old routes blindfolded.

Utilizing the 10 songs from the "Greendale" recording (backed by his trusty band Crazy Horse) as his soundtrack, Young stitches together a thinly dramatic reverie about Middle America, or rather that folky, politically progressive corner of it known as Northern California. His fictional town of Greendale is a crunchy-granola variation on Grover's Corners, an insular, hangin'-out community where plaid woolen work shirts are forever in style, children of the '70s have names like Sun and Earth, and their Woodstock-generation parents still can't dance to save their lives.

Young embodies this nostalgic lifestyle in the Green family, which includes the pony-tailed Grandpa Green (Ben Keith), his artist son Earl (James Mazzeo) and Earl's wife, Edith (Elizabeth Keith), their harmonica-playing nephew Jed (Eric Johnson) and the aforementioned daughter of Earl and Edith, Sun, a political activist-in-training. Not for nothing are they named Green: These are the diehard idealists who make Ralph Nader possible.

The Greens' bucolic, porch-rocking lifestyle is shattered when Jed, presumably egged on by his Devil-ish alter ego (Johnson, doubling in flashy red shoes and blazer), shoots a cop in a panic over a stash of drugs in his car. As Jed lolls in jail, the media descend en masse upon Grandpa Green, who bullishly defends his right to privacy. Inspired by Grandpa's example, Sun goes on a political tear over the war in Iraq and ecological preservation in Alaska.

The film's dialogue emerges through Young's singing voice, which the characters lip-synch in conversational style. The technique can be effective when the songs have a narrative or character-driven thrust, as in "Bandit" (which ranks with Young's vintage compositions), and "Carmichael," in which the cop Jed killed is remembered by his widow and colleagues.

But the wit and nuance of Young's lyrics is more often undermined by the naive, home-movie level of his direction (under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey) and camerawork. What is intended as a multileveled evocation of Young's values approaches parody, a Christopher Guest-like goof on flower children who stayed too long at the fair.