Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Netflix 2022) is the sort of thing that you watch when you're not in the mood for something ambitious or daunting, when you're tired and don't want to pay much attention and, when explosions and murder aren't the vessel to carry you across a bit of mild depression on a sub-zero weekend night. The movie is the sort of genteel, mildly interesting documentary that you might watch while waiting for the cold opening to Saturday Night Live. That said, this documentary is well-made, thought-provoking, and provides some interesting insights into the life and times of famous Canadian singer-songwriter. And, of course, the show features about twenty versions of Cohen's justly renowned "Hallelujah," and, so, it's worth watching for that reason alone. (It's a bit frustrating that the documentary doesn't show any complete performance of the song -- we're left with suggestive snippets; presumably, the filmmakers think everyone knows the song, more or less word by word, and, further, there are many variations with respect to the lyrics. Cohen wrote the song over 7 years and, then, continued to tinker with it, introducing some fairly explicit sexual snarkiness when the tune had been in currency for about ten years -- these are the so-called "naughty bits" that were eliminated from the family-friendly version that is best known to most people from the movie Shrek.) I can't recall when I first heard the song, probably it was on TV, Scrubs or The West Wing or, perhaps, in the movie Basquiat.
Hallelujah provides a thumbnail sketch of Cohen's career, narrated by a Rolling Stone writer, "Ratso" Sloman (seen interviewing Cohen in the mid-nineties) with commentary by various women that he knew -- any biography of Cohen will likely include several former paramours; he seems to have had affairs with vast numbers of accomplished and articulate women. One of these women, Susan Pacal, also from Montreal and a lifelong friend, is particularly eloquent; like Cohen, she speaks in complex fully formed sentences, her voicetrembling a bit with Parkinson's disease. Like most of the witnesses, she is now very old. After beginning with a sequence in which Cohen sings "Hallelujah" on his knees, the film chronicles the singer's life in a manner that is, more or less, "sperm to worm". The initial concert footage is from one of the old man's tours after he had to return to the stage to recoup money embezzled from him. (Like Bob Dylan, Cohen toured, more or less, continuously in the last fifteen years of his life.) We see Cohen commenting on his disastrous encounter with Phil Spector (the eccentric producer mixed "The Death of a Ladies' Man", more or less vandalizing the singer's spare and aphoristic lyrics with his bombastic "wall of sound.") A former girlfriend seems reluctant to participate in the venture and offers enigmatic remarks about Cohen's life in the nineties -- she resists the interviewer's questions. There are some interesting shots of Cohen as a Zen monk at the Mount Baldy Zen Center -- Susan Pacal says that the place was "a primordial heap of rubble" and that it was not for "the meek." Sharon Robinson, one of Cohen's backup singers but also a collaborator, tells us how the artist announced to her that there was no money in his ATM account. After being defrauded, Cohen began touring and, of course, there is plenty of footage of him performing all over the world. The film includes montages of "Hallelujah" being sung by various artists and performers, including on American Idol. There is clip of Shrek singing the song with Cohen's French girlfriend, saying with a sniff: "It's a cartoon, right? Of course, I haven't seen it."
We learn that the song was first recorded for Columbia in the late eighties on a record called Various Positions. (Cohen's music always traffics in sexual innuendo to the extent that even, more or less, innocent lyrics get interpreted as risque or, even, scandalous. The film exec who bought "Hallelujah" for Shrek says that she eliminated the line about being "tied to the kitchen chair" -- actually, one of the few lyrics in the song that isn't sexually suggestive: Cohen is singing about being forced into domesticity, not some sort of kinky bondage session.) For some reason that remains inexplicable, a Columbia executive killed Various Positions and the record was never released in the United States (it was sold abroad and successful in the UK and France.) This act was unprecedented. Jon Issenauer, Cohen's recording producer noted that the record had "already been paid for" and that the executive who quashed Various Positions must have had some sort of uniquely virulent hatred for Cohen -- after all, the record contained three bona fide hits that would have made Columbia lots of money if the songs had been played in the United States. Other artists knew the record and "Hallelujah" and began covering the song -- Bob Dylan, for instance, played the song in concert on many occasions; Dylan obviously understood the song intimately -- the sexually recriminations begin in its third line: "But you didn't really care much for music do yah". John Cale made the song famous on a Cohen tribute album. Later, Jeff Buckley performed a brilliant and haunting version of "Hallelujah" and it was this cover that ultimately catapulted the song to fame: it was used in innumerable movies and TV shows including a famous episode of The West Wing. (Someone remarks that previous 'grumbly' versions by old guys -- John Cale and Dylan -- didn't seem to interest most younger listeners.) Since the song came out of nowhere and hadn't really been properly released, "Hallelujah" gave the impression of being a melody with enigmatic lyrics that had always been around -- a kind of sexually suggestive folk song.
The documentary doesn't spend any time analyzing the song and doesn't attempt to explain its appeal. This is a bit disappointing and I would have liked to hear some exegesis of "Hallelujah" along with musical commentary. I suppose the filmmakers' concept was that the song should speak for itself and be perceived on its own terms -- but this is naive: as I've noted, the song doesn't even exist in any stable version -- someone says that there may exist 150 stanzas to the song, most, of which, have never seen the light of day although the movie shows notations of variant lyrics in Cohen's notebooks. Furthermore, like all masterpieces, the song can't be reduced to any particular meaning and, therefore, some remarks on what some of the lines seem to suggest or imply would not deface the tune in the slightest. No one says anything about the fact that the song is a kind of "novelty" number in which Cohen has to find as many rhymes as possible for "hallelujah", a word that isn't really conducive to any rhymes at all -- hence, Cohen has to use phrases like "outdrew you", pronouncing the "you" as "yah"; anyone who has heard Cohen's grave and courtly diction knows that he would never pronounce "you" in the way that the song requires and, so, the lyrics set up a tension between the songwriter's formal eloquence and the slangy idiom necessary to make the rhymes work The fact that Cohen pulls off this high-wire act without the song becoming ridiculous -- it's always on the razor-edge of slipping into self-parody -- is the miracle that he accomplishes with this song.
The film supplies an interesting metaphor for interpretative brilliance. Cohen's grandfather was a renowned rabbi in Montreal. He knew the Torah so well that, it was said, that if someone drove a pin through the scripture's scroll, the rabbi would be able to tell you every Hebrew word, even every letter, pierced by that pin.
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