By Jake Coyle, AP Film Writer
It's not exactly a hit parade, the songs that have been turned into movies. There was the shambling reconstruction of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," the fizzy pop of "Earth Girls Are Easy," the Sandra Bullock rom-com "Love Potion No.9." But digging into a Leonard Cohen song, as the documentary "Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love" does, holds more promise. Cohen's songs can hold eternities in them.
And the story behind Cohen's classic ballad "So Long, Marianne" is indeed one that spans many years, from the masterful Montreal singer-songwriter's beginnings to his death in 2016. In the early '60s, Cohen was living far from his native Canada in a sun-kissed bohemia paradise on the Greek island of Hydra, taking acid, writing feverishly and falling in love with a young, blonde, warm-spirited Norwegian woman named Marianne Ihlen, who had a son from her first marriage to the writer Axel Jensen.
Their blissful romance came before fame found Cohen. When he turned from novel writing to music and eventually — coaxed by Judy Collins — singing his own songs, Cohen was catapulted far from Hydra, signed to Columbia Records and hailed as a baritone-voiced sage. Among his first songs was an ode to Ihlen, "So Long, Marianne." It wasn't initially intended as an epitaph to his relationship with Ihlen but came to be one.
They continued together off-and-on for years, but gradually grew apart. Cohen, whose fifth studio album was titled "Death of a Ladies Man," moved on to other places and other women. (Janis Joplin was among them.) Yet Cohen's romance with Ihlen became mythic, a legend Cohen burnished, himself. He put her photograph on his second album and continued to talk reflectively about Ihlen on stage after their relationship disintegrated. Shortly before Ihlen died at 81 of leukemia in 2016, Cohen left her a tender message that soon-thereafter went viral.
"I'm just a little bit behind you, close enough to take your hand," said Cohen. He died four months later.
"Marianne & Leonard" bookends its tale with that moment, and it sometimes stretches to fill the chapters in between. Since the film was made posthumously, neither of its principals were interviewed, leaving director Nick Broomfield to rely largely on secondhand sources. And Cohen and Ihlen's connection, while obviously deep, feels less like a feature-length story than a short; a song, not an album.
Broomfield is a veteran British documentary maker who has often inserted himself into his films about Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston. But even though Broomfield also had a romance with Ihlen, he largely keeps his distance here. The golden footage of Ihlen and Cohen on Hydra is curtesy of D.A. Pennebaker, who was there in between making a pair of '60s non-fiction classics: "Don't Look Back" and "Monterey Pop."
Those images and the passage of time give "Marianne & Leonard" a wistful nostalgia and a melancholy reflection on how love can reverberate for decades in life and in art, long after its participants have parted.
But strands of the story tug at that romantic notion. Those misgivings are best voiced by Aviva Layton, widow of the poet Irving Layton and friend to the couple, who takes a dim view to the open marriages of the '60s and the children who often paid the price. Ihlen's son, Axel, wound up in a mental institution. And the rosy portrait is muddied, too, by the years Cohen strung Ihlen along at great pain to her, even as he sung her praises around the world.
And yet the sweet melody of "So Long, Marianne" is hard to resist. Earlier this year, the love letters Cohen wrote Ihlen fetched $1.2 million at auction. But Cohen, himself, may have felt some guilt over Ihlen and Axel receding from his life. In the poem "Days of Kindness," he wrote: "I pray a loving memory exists for them, too, the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world."
"Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love," a Roadside Attractions release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for some drug material, sexual references and brief nudity. Running time: 97 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More