ALIVE INSIDE (Dan Cohen 2014)

[Chris Knipp]

Dan Cohen: Alive Inside (2014)

If music be the food of. . . memory? .

This documentary about a high-tech achiever-cum-social worker who's found a cause presents music as a way of treating patients with Alzheimers, dementia or other problems. Visiting nursing homes, Dan Cohen found that putting headphones on elderly people linked to iPods loaded with their favorite kinds of music could bring back memories and revive lost or dormant powers of speech or memory, even in the case of Denise, a bipolar schizophrenic, get them to put aside their walkers and get up and dance. Even a bedridden, near-catatonic old lady begins to jerk around, moving to the sounds, when fitted with headphones. Documentary filmmaker Rossato-Bennett filmed Cohen for three years, and this film is the result, with an over-obtrusive voiceover by the director that is one of a number of evident defects in an otherwise well-meaning effort.

Alive Inside is a work of advocacy, a kind of demo tape that might be used to sell the idea of using this simple, inexpensive method of "treatment" that might do better in some cases than debilitating and expensive drugs (which, of course, have the power of Big Pharma behind them). Unfortunately Cohen, in his passion for the cause, seems more focused on his fundraising and promotional efforts than on helping produce a really interesting and varied film. The result feels thin and pushed, filled out with archival footage, montages, and shots of fireworks. Yet the film also takes on more than it can handle in its points about the inadequacy of the whole nursing home, elder care system in America, which requires separate treatment.

The vignettes Cohen provides of old people having their memories revived are unnecessarily repetitious, but dramatic -- and given added poignancy by old-photo montages of the individuals in their prime. He starts with a 90-year-old black woman. She's friendly and articulate, but says she can remember nothing of her youth. But when Cohen puts on the phones with Louis Armstrong singing "When the Saints Go Marching in," it awakens a veritable flood of memories, with times and places. A man named Henry is much more withdrawn, but, a family member explains and old snapshots show, was dapper and lively and loved music and dancing when young. With help from Cobble Hill Recreation Therapist Yvonne Hill, the downcast and silent Henry starts smiling and vocalizing when he hears the strains of Cab Calloway. Cohen's efforts to raise the $50 a head through his Music & Memory group to provide iPods and cheap headphones for nursing home patients got nowhere till a video of Henry on Redit went viral and donations began pouring in.

Oliver Sacks we recall advocated treating catatonic patients with L-Dopa in his book Awakenings, made into the Robin Williams movie. He appears here to assert that "music is inseparable from emotion" and therefore is "not just a physiological stimulus" but through emotion can bring back memories. Singer-musician Bobbie McFerrin also gives an expert opinion. Lacking, though, is any mention of long-used music therapy techniques, or information on how lasting the effects of these iPod sessions are. L-Dopa proved only temporary for the catatonic. The larger issue of how society, then nursing homes, put old people out of the way and leave them to rot rather than making them a vital part of social life, is an important one. But this isn't a good enough film to add much to that discussion.

Alive Inside, 78 mins., debuted January 2014 at Sundance, where. Amy Goodman interviewed Cohen for Democracy Now!. The film opened in New York 17 July 2014. Opens 8 August 2014, at Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinemas in San Francisco, Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, Camera 7 in San Jose. Also opens August 15, 2014 at Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.