the gospel according to paul.
In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon is, on one level, a simple rock documentary: the creative process is celebrated, the career story unfolds album by album, and we tilt a bit, at times, into Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story territory, with a sort of rise and fall and rise again narrative. Simon’s relationships to friends and lovers—Art Garfunkel, Lorne Michaels, Carrie Fisher, Edie Brickell—float across the surface of the story. Even Simon’s lyrics, which are often wry, witty, funny, heartfelt, wise, and profound, almost evaporate away in the film. To convey their literary beauty, humor, and cleverness, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney places handwritten versions of them across the screen, but they disappear. Everything dissolves into the mist above a more oceanic element.
Within standard rockumentary fare, below the biographical ups and downs, the relationships gone wrong or made right, and even below Simon’s brilliant wielding of language, is his deeper love affair with sounds themselves. They seem, far more than relationships and even more than words, to be the only things that actually make Simon happy—and even then only passingly, in moments of what he calls “bliss.”
Throughout the film, we watch his puppy dog facial expressions at the world, particularly as he ages. We glimpse his overall sense of what looks to be bemusement, skepticism, dissatisfaction, alienation, almost misanthropy at times. There is a kind of distance to his gaze at the world. Yet it turns into something else when he is engaged with musical creation. Performing with a wide range of musicians or composing his recent spiritual meditation on death, Seven Psalms, in his home studio, some other side of Simon appears. We see something almost like a twinkle in his eye appear when he finds a new way to twist his gentle tenor around one of his fine melodies or when he discovers a fresh chordal harmonic change.
Here, the film suggests overall, is someone who is oddly at one and the same time both open and closed to the world, who receives its many forces, energies, politics, cultural developments in the world, keeping, as he puts it, his finger on the pulse, but also pulling back, alone, highly aware of what he called, in one song, the “myth of the fingerprints.” He has learned to live alone. Yet there is something powerfully social about the only living boy in New York. Like a tuning fork, he channels larger vibrations into musical communiques, transferring the everyday static into something skyward. His own biographical relationships inform this work and the lyrics are a kind of impress of it, a record, a set of stamped observations; but it is, in the end, only the music that gets Simon to another plane. He seeks sounds worthy of existing beyond silence.