Entertainment Weekly

http://music-mix.ew.com/2011/04/21/elton-j...ussell-tribeca/

Elton John premieres Cameron Crowe-directed music doc starring himself and Leon Russell, plays the hits at Tribeca Film Festival
by Joseph Brannigan Lynch

Surrounded by the after-hours glow of Lower Manhattan skyscrapers and buffeted by winds rolling in off of New York Harbor, Elton John wrapped up the opening night of the tenth annual Tribeca Film Festival with performances of such evergreen Elton classics as “Tiny Dancer,” “Rocket Man” and “Your Song.”

His solo piano performance followed the world premiere of Cameron Crowe’s The Union, a music documentary that followed Sir John and legendary rock pianist Leon Russell as the two Rock Hall of Famers recorded an album together last year.

The Union turned out to be a pleasantly affecting surprise. What could have merely been a music doc about two aging rockers recording a late-career album was instead a heartfelt, decades-belated love letter from Elton John to his early career idol and one of his greatest influences, Leon Russell. Plus, it was fun to watch the flick sitting behind a group that included the uncommonly talented actors Anna Kendrick (Twilight, Up in the Air), Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), and Zoe Kazan (It’s Complicated). Kendrick’s eyes were glued to the screen while Dano and Kazan were smoochily glued to each other—that’s what the PortaPotties are there for, you crazy kids!)

Elton and Leon toured together in the early ’70s but apparently hadn’t seen each other since. So it was no surprise that without much more than a phone call to renew their association, the initial scenes of the film show a stoic, flattered but reticent Russell interacting with an excited, nervous and creatively deferential Elton John.

According to Captain Fantastic, Leon Russell influenced his piano playing and music writing more than any other artist—and this was after he astoundingly told the cameras he thought there were “50 or 60″ pianists who influenced him over the years. But it makes sense: if you listen to Russell’s rollicking yet masterfully-arranged first few albums, it is hard to imagine Elton’s Tumbleweed Connection or Honky Chateau existing without Russell’s mash-up of country, blues and early rock ‘n’ roll.

Over the course of their collaborative recording sessions—which seemed to favor Russell’s sound while placing John in the role of creative coordinator—Leon began to thaw out and as Elton put it, “come to life again.” John was even more to tears at one point as he witnesses Russell’s effortless, emotionally honest composition process.

In spite of an emergency five-hour brain surgery that put their sessions on hold for ten days, the magnificently-bearded Russell seemed twice as lively and engaged in the world as the recording process and documentary came to a close.

Ultimately, Cameron Crow’s The Union is a lovely and simple thing: it’s about one of rock’s most respected icons using his enormous celebrity to orchestrate a long-overdue reappraisal of his musical icon and one of the pivotal, under-appreciated voices in rock songwriting.

In case you aren’t jetting to New York to catch an upcoming screening of The Union, here are some of the film’s highlights:

While explaining how he has accepted that his records will never sell like they used to, he opined that perhaps Michael Jackson’s consuming drive to top Thriller “was part of his problem.” This is paraphrasing, but he said something like, “It’s all well and good Michael, but you’re never going to outsell Thriller… to make a better record, that’s another matter.”

Stevie Nicks dropped in to tell Leon that after she and Lindsey Buckingham opened for him as part of the band Fritz in the early ’70s, “That’s when the two of us thought, ‘That’s it. We’re gonna go to LA. We’re gonna do it.”

Leon Russell cleared up some of the history around one of the Carpenters’ signature hit “Superstar,”which he initially co-wrote for his Mad Dogs and Englishman tour mate Rita Coolidge. According to Russell, he overhead Coolidge refer to Dionne Warwick as a “superstar.” The word, new to him, caught his attention and inspired him to write the song for Coolidge.

Elton John on arriving in the U.S. in 1970: “I imagined Los Angeles to be exactly like The Beverly Hillbillies. Which, of course, it was.”

Elton John on Leon Russell: “He never takes a bad picture. But when you look like God, I suppose you don’t.”

Although he’s said it before, it’s still astonishing to hear that in over 40 years, lyricist Bernie Taupin has never been in the room when Elton puts melodies to Taupin’s words.

When asked which of his early songs he wishes were given more attention today, Elton cited “Friends,” the title track to the soundtrack for a forgotten 1971 British film of the same name.

da DVD Talk

www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/49443/union-the/

By 2009, Elton John had reached a point where he was, in his words, "too young to retire, and too old to make music that was crap." So he decided to look back, to make the kind of songs that he started out wanting to make. To do that, he decided to collaborate on an album with Leon Russell, his idol, whom he'd toured with in the early 1970s and hadn't seen since. John became a multi-platform superstar, a cultural icon, an industry. Russell--who was always more of a musician's musician than a pop star--was all but forgotten, doing small gigs in secondary markets. John reached out to him. They made the album. The great T-Bone Burnett produced it.

And Cameron Crowe filmed it. Crowe, who started out as a music journalist (his experiences at Rolling Stone inspired Almost Famous, his best film to date), has always had a barely-concealed fascination with bootlegs and studio chatter; he's perfectly suited to direct The Union, a lightweight but ultimately moving documentary account of John and Russell's collaboration.

The film is also, almost in passing, a biography of the two men, and Crowe's archaeological bent is well-employed--he trots out old tapes, rare TV performances, the works. But he's primarily focused on the present, even if the past is always lurking in the subtext. What's up front is production, the act of putting the album together, and to his credit, Crowe gets what feels like one of the more thorough accounts we've seen of the process of making an album. John, clad almost every day in identical black Adidas tracksuits, is a bundle of energy and enthusiasm, working the songs, trying new things, pulling the rock up the hill. Russell is more of a laid-back, Yoda-like creature, Mr. Zen in his loud shirts, stroking his wispy white beard and exhibiting his dry wit and wry comic timing (When he first saw John, he says, he "thought my career was over. Pretty much was, actually...").

The Union is not an aged Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, all full of ego trips and conflict. But the creation of the record is not an entirely smooth ride; it takes the two men some time to find their working rhythm, and John is frequently his own worst enemy (a stark scene finds him recording his leading vocals, and struggling badly). Early on, Russell has a near-fatal health scare, resulting in a five-hour brain operation; he returns to the studio understandably shaken, and easily exhausted. But it's also given him a shot of urgency; he sits down to play a new song, and jokes about it, to lower expectations ("I had just taken my Ambien when I wrote this... now here in the light of day, I'm trying to remember what it was"). But what comes out is raw, full, powerful, and--in the film's most extraordinary scene--John is absolutely overcome with emotion while listening to it. That's when he knows they're on to something.

In his interviews, John is refreshingly candid and impeccably self-aware--he knows who he is, where he's at, and what his place is. "If it doesn't sell, it doesn't sell," he says. "I don't care. It's the music I want to make." (That said, he sure does spend a lot of screen time fretting about the opening week sales.) When they do a photo shoot together after the album is complete, he talks to Russell about what a happy experience it was for him, and it doesn't feel like put-on show biz bullshit staged for the camera--it's so warm and heartfelt, you just believe it. And you agree.

Crowe keeps his cameras present, hanging out in the studios, watching the men work, chatting with Burnett (who defines his role as just being a good listener, since as producer, "you're a proxy for the audience"). The filmmaker, who hit a bad bump a few years back with the unfortunate Elizabethtown (a film that, I maintain, would have been about twice as good and nowhere near as panned with just about any other actor in its leading role), is perhaps going back to his roots in the same way John was. He's clearly having a ball making the movie--trying out different looks with contrasting video formats and film stocks, and using the split screen so frequently and so skillfully that it almost becomes an illustration of the film's thematic movements. The various partnerships--John and Russell, John and lyricist Bernie Taupin, the performers and Burnett--are separate, but they're working in harmony, feeding off of each other to become a single unit. Late in the film, John sings "Border Song," by himself on the piano, and Crowe puts the singer's younger self in the other half of the split screen, eloquently saying more in that visual about the passing of time and the power of pop music than any sociological essay could. At the end of The Union, on the day of the album's release, the two men play together at the Beacon Theater in New York, and in their final voice-overs, each shares his thoughts and appreciation of what the other man did for him--then and now. The words have weight. The sentiments have power. It's a charming conclusion to a truly lovely picture.