Documentary Review: Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song

Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song (2022)

Directed by Dayna Goldfine, Dan Geller

Produced by Sony Pictures Classics

Starring Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Brandi Carlisle, Eric Church

Release Date July 1st, 2022

My first exposure to the work of Leonard Cohen came from the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume. That film starred Christian Slater as a teenage pirate radio host. Slater’s character used Cohen’s song, Everybody Knows, as an emblem of the character's own cynical worldview. It was a potent and memorable inclusion. Cohen’s voice and his reputation provided a gravitas to the movie with Cohen having a reputation as a thinking man’s pop star.

I heard, and became infatuated with, Everybody Knows even before I had heard and loved the song that became Cohen’s most beloved and memorable work, Hallelujah. For me, it was not until Jeff Buckley had died tragically and his version of Hallelujah had become the most well known and talked about version of the song that I had heard the song. Eventually, I heard Cohen’s version and found it inferior to both Buckley and John Cale’s more mainstream takes on the song.

The new documentary Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song does well to restore the historic place Cohen’s Hallelujah deserves. That’s not to say that I don’t still prefer Buckley and Cale, but I now have the context to understand where Cohen was coming from when he wrote multiple versions of the song and endless verses that vacillate between religious, personal, and sexual themes. It’s the picture of an artist tortured and delighted by his muse and the story of Hallelujah in the documentary is frankly more compelling than Cohen’s versions of the song.

Hallelujah Leonard Cohen a Journey, A Song intends to be both a typical documentary biopic on the career of Leonard Cohen and an extensive biography of the song Hallelujah. That’s an interesting but ultimately flawed approach. The documentary spends a lot of time on Hallelujah and the versions of the song and the singers talking about how much it means for them to sing it but it only serves as hagiography. The legend of Hallelujah is already pretty well known and respected.

For me, Malcolm Gladwell already told the definitive story of Hallelujah on his podcast Revisionist History. On that show Gladwell related the anecdotes about Cohen’s lengthy revisions, Cohen’s iconic sit down with Bob Dylan, where Dylan praised the song and pried Cohen to tell him how long it took to write the song, long lived legend. And, in arguably the most interesting anecdote, Gladwell related the fascinating and unlikely way that Jeff Buckley found the song.

Interestingly, that story is changed ever so slightly in this documentary and it’s hard to say which version is the truth. According to Gladwell, Buckley was house-sitting in Park Slope when he found the Leonard Cohen tribute record, Leonard Cohen I’m Your Fan. That record had only been released in Paris as a magazine insert according to Gladwell's telling. The chances of it being in Park Slope in 1991 for Jeff Buckley to find it are incalculable. On that record is John Cale’s iconic piano version of Hallelujah. That inspired Buckley to take up his guitar and create his version of the song that has since eclipsed both Cale and Cohen.

In Hallelujah Leonard Cohen a Journey, A Song, the scene shifts to Buckley couch surfing in New York City. While staying at the home of a woman who organized a series concert get togethers in a former church, she introduced Buckley to Cale’s version of the song and he played it live on stage that same night. Her version seems to have more merit as it’s a firsthand account but who knows for sure.

Much like that friend who claims to have been at Green Day’s first concert or was there the first time so and so played iconic song B, anecdotes such as these become legends and grow, expand, and become embellished as time goes on. I don’t think this woman in the documentary is lying, rather I just don’t know what the truth is when there are conflicting and compelling versions of the story.

In the most meandering and least welcome portion of the documentary, much time is spent talking about how the use of Hallelujah in Shrek came to be. The anecdotes about how the makers of Shrek commissioned Rufus Wainwright to create a tame and family friendly version of Hallelujah before settling on a compromise with Wainwright to include some of the quote unquote ‘naughty bits’ of the song, isn’t nearly as interesting as the producers seem to think it is. Yes, Shrek brought Hallelujah and Leonard Cohen back to the mainstream but that’s pretty much all that is interesting about what Shrek brings to Hallelujah.

That’s the biggest problem of Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song, the meandering. The film keeps promising things and dancing around them. One of the missed opportunities is the record Cohen made with Phil Specter, Death of a Ladies Man. The record was a massive departure for Cohen and he had many conflicts with the unpredictable, mercurial, and ultimately dangerous Specter that this documentary shies away from in favor of things like the lengthy Shrek digression.

Most egregiously, the makers of this documentary talk a lot about Jeff Buckley and his version of Hallelujah but they fail to ask the question we all wanted the answer to: What did Leonard Cohen think of Buckley’s take on the song? The movie walks right up to the question with archive footage of Cohen seemingly on the cusp of answering the question and then it simply never gets answered. A simple Google search claims Cohen loved Buckley’s take but why the documentary avoids the question is anyone’s guess.

Ultimately, I found Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song unsatisfying but not bad. It’s a perfectly fine documentary. That it doesn’t provide exactly what I was hoping for is not the fault of the filmmakers. They made the documentary they intended to make and as it is, on their terms, it’s entertaining and has some good anecdotes from people who worked with, befriended, and loved Leonard Cohen. For most this will be enough. For me, I can’t escape the things I think could have made the documentary more comprehensive and satisfying.

Hallelujah Leonard Cohen A Journey, A Song is available now on your preferred streaming rental platform. Find my archive of more than 20 years and nearly 2000 movie reviews at SeanattheMovies.Blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at @PodcastSean and follow my archive blog on Twitter @SeanattheMovies. You can also hear me talk about movies on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast on your favorite podcasting app.