Today's Edition
ROBERT ITO (NEW YORK TIMES)
Paul Simon had only one request of the filmmaker undertaking “In Restless Dreams”, a documentary about his life: “He wanted the music to sound good,” the director and producer Alex Gibney said.
“In Restless Dreams” begins with Simon’s earliest days growing up in Queens, New York, as he and his onetime musical partner Art Garfunkel learned to harmonise by listening to the Everly Brothers. We see Simon (and sometimes Garfunkel) create beloved albums including “Sounds of Silence”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Graceland”; perform in Central Park in 1981, a concert that attracted half a million fans and led to a brief reunion of the duo; and tackle everything from movie soundtracks (“The Graduate”) to acting roles (“One-Trick Pony”).
There are several scenes of Simon working on some of American pop music’s most memorable tunes in a manner that has long impressed contemporaries like Wynton Marsalis, who met Simon in 2002. “He has a mystical understanding,” Marsalis said in a video interview. “He can see the timeless through the specific.”
“He was like that when he was a kid,” Marsalis continued. “If you know the age he was when he wrote ‘The Sound of Silence,’ that’s all you need to know.” (Simon was 21).
Filming for “In Restless Dreams” began in the summer of 2021, after Simon and Gibney came to a mutual agreement about the movie. “We both decided that it would be my film and my interpretation,” Gibney said. “Paul has a reputation as being a somewhat prickly character, so I didn’t know exactly what I was going to get,” he added. “So I was surprised, frankly, that over time, he was willing to share quite a lot, including his trials and tribulations with his health.”
When Gibney arrived at Wimberley, Simon, 82, was losing his hearing in his left ear, which affected his ability to hear pitches and sing in tune. Expecting to memorialise a master songwriter at work on what would become a particularly personal album – Jon Pareles of The New York Times called it “observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing” – he captured something that was, in many ways, all the more poignant because of the struggle behind its creation.“You saw a guy who was used to being extremely healthy and athletic for most of his life, and now, suddenly, things were happening that he couldn’t control,” Gibney said.
Marsalis, who makes several appearances in the film, admitted it was a hard thing to watch. “But he doesn’t whine, you know. He’s not like ‘woe is me’. He’s just trying to find solutions to problems.”
At one point in the film, Marsalis launches into an extended list of things that he and Simon have talked about over the years.
“That’s one of these great moments that happen that you could never expect,” said Andy Grieve, the film’s editor. “It just quickly paints such a vivid picture of that friendship.”
Gibney said he found the moment remarkable: “I don’t know if could remember a list that long,” he said. “It was a reckoning.”
At another point, Grieve pairs contemporary audio of Simon speaking about the dissolution of his friendship with Garfunkel with archival footage of the two young men, at the height of their fame, sweetly singing and scatting to “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” on a hotel bed.
According to Simon, the inspiration for “Seven Psalms” came to him in a dream in 2019.
The filmmakers pored through hundreds of hours of audiotapes and archival footage and thousands of photos, many from Simon’s own collection. Simon lived much of his life in front of the camera, so it was less a matter of finding, say, footage of him singing “Cecilia”, than it was of choosing which version out of dozens of them was the best.
For Gibney, who has made many films over the years about villains and cheats, corruption and deception, being able to tell the story of such a beloved songwriter was a welcome change. “I love his music, so this was a labour of love in the truest sense,” he said.
Not that it was an easy story to tell. “It’s a story of struggle,” he said. “But without the struggle, it would have been a less interesting film. It would have been a greatest hits film. But the struggle of trying to reckon with your own mortality, even as you’re creating, and how that relates to the entirety of your life? That’s potent.”
