Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song

There’s something about Canadian writer/poet/singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen that seems to shine so brightly that people always want to approach his life from an angle and never succeed in getting very close. Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, did have an extensive interview but was intercut it with a tribute concert while Marianne & Me: Words Of Love came at Cohen via his love for his Swedish muse Marianne Ihlen, with Nick Broomfield shoehorning himself into the film for good measure. Now it’s the turn of Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, whose previous films include Ballets Russes, and who approach the musician largely from the perspective of his most famous song, Hallelujah. The end result could do with less tangent and more of the gent himself.

Things start well, with a decent potted history of how Cohen came to move from the written word to the sung and how his Jewish roots influenced his approach to songwriting which, as has been noted down the years, has hovered between holiness and hedonism. Talking to those who actually knew him, particularly author Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who befriended and interviewed Cohen down the years, offers some solid background as the film’s second theme, Hallelujah, itself is introduced through various iterations in notebooks. Cohen was a writer who really worked at his craft. As he put it himself: “There hardly is a first thought. It’s all sweat.”; although just how seriously he means this is hard to know given how slyly twinkly he was in interviews. Still, that there were many versions of Hallelujah is a fact you can take to the bank, with Ratso, when asked for the number, saying, “180 comes to mind”. And, it’s to be hoped that you, at the very least feel agnostic towards Hallelujah going into this documentary, because this is not a film for non-believers and you will have heard it, well, 180 times, comes to mind, by the end.

This is part of the film’s problem, it’s hooked on Hallelujah and gets carried away by it to such a degree that Cohen feels left on the sidelines for a chunk of the film. In an odd mirror of what happened in real life after Columbia refused to release the album with the song on, Various Positions, in the US when Cohen first delivered it, before the track went on to find an afterlife in the hands of others before circling back to its maker, Cohen’s story becomes jettisoned for a run over the jumps of what happened to his tune. While this allows contributions about John Cale and Jeff Buckley that are mildly interesting, it would have been better still to hear more about the man himself and how he worked on the studio, especially given that his producer John Lissauer’s part in the tale proves so interesting whenever he gets a chance to talk about it. There’s a sense that the directors realised this too, but they would have been better to trim the middle section bloat rather than returning belatedly to Cohen to give him more time towards the end. This latter section, focusing again on what Cohen thought – and you might find yourself cheering as he notes “a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart” at the song’s resurgence - also celebrates Cohen’s staying power and return to performance. Finally, courtesy of the man himself, we’re offered the sort of major lift the film could have done with earlier.