Alex Gibney’s docu-celebration of Paul Simon unfolds over an epic three-and-a-half hours, but he persuades you that this is exactly how much time was needed. There is something very involving and very personal here: something to do with the slight, pure line of Simon’s unmistakable vocal presence, vulnerable and even fragile, perhaps, but also insistent and durable. Simon is of course the genius songwriter from New York whose speaking voice, to my ear, sounds increasingly like that of Woody Allen. Gibney’s camera joins Simon – a grandfatherly but spry figure – as he works on his latest choral album Seven Psalms, then flashes back to his earliest years with Art Garfunkel, and brings us up to the present.
Simon says the sensational harmonies of his double-act with Garfunkel were originally inspired by the Everly Brothers, and once that comparison is made it’s impossible to unhear it. Back in the day they were folk-rock million-sellers: goofy and real and relatably uncool. Two scarf-wearing college kids with different types of terrible hair who uniquely plugged themselves into the yearning 60s zeitgeist via their work on Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s bewilderment and ennui were superbly conveyed like a soundtrack coming from inside his character’s head. Simon’s songs, such as The Sound of Silence and Mrs Robinson, were eerily plaintive and compelling; they were often composed at a moment’s notice, virtually improvised, and spoke to middle America’s countercultural and generational alienation.
