Film Review: Begin Again (Carney, 2013)

John Carney's Begin Again offers more winsome (if tediously foul-mouthed) music-based uplift in the mould of the director’s overpraised Once, though decidedly glossier and with the dubious added bonus of Keira Knightley grimacing and gurning away in one of the lead roles. Knightley plays—or, in her usual manner, has a game go at playing—Greta, an English girl in New York who gets dumped by her musician boyfriend (Adam Levine, of Maroon 5, in a creditable film debut) and finds herself dragged along to an open mic night where she’s talent spotted by Dan (Mark Ruffalo) a down-on-his-luck music exec who hearspotential in her fey folky warblings. The film follows the pair as they collaborate on an album, its tracks recorded live in different locations in the city.

Carney can be insightful on music biz machinations and these aspects provide some of the more interesting elements of the picture. But Begin Again (which was called Can A Song Save Your Life? when I saw it at TIFF last year, and I’m not sure how much of an improvement the new title can be considered) is ultimately too transparent in its feel-good designs upon the audience and too clumpy in its plotting. It’s the kind of movie in which everything is on the surface, every emotional beat underlined and made obvious. Greta starts meddling in Dan’s personal life just so the pair can have a little spat but ultimately the movie is all about relationships getting repaired—lives being saved, indeed—by the healing power of song. That could work, were the featured tracks, written by the formerly-witty Gregg Alexander, not such bland affairs (just as they were in Once)—folk-influenced pop full of would-be poetic musings, and as forgettable as the film’s title. In addition, for all the wittering about artistic integrity and “authenticity” that goes on here, the movie itself feels mighty inauthentic: when the characters are in a tight spot, for example, they simply call on a beneficent multi-millionaire hip-hop star (Cee-Lo Green) to help them out.

 

Catherine Keener and Hailie Steinfeld go to waste as Ruffalo’s estranged wife and kid, but Ruffalo himself brings some rumpled charisma to his role and James Corden does some pleasantly relaxed funny-buddy schtick as Greta’s busker pal. The movie is undistinguished, and I found it resistible (much more so than the superficially crummier Walking on Sunshine; see below). But it probably pushes enough buttons to turn itself into a hit.

Review: True Grit (Coen, 2010)

The Coens's track record with remakes (remember their miserable take on The Ladykillers [2004]?) and the fact that I’ve found myself recoiling at the mannered quirks and misanthropy of their last couple of films didn’t make True Grit an especially appealing prospect for me. Well, surprise: the film turns out, against the odds, to be one of the brothers’ most entertaining and certainly most emotionally satisfying works. The 1969 film version with John Wayne, Kim Darby and Glen Campbell casts a long shadow; indeed, it seems to be screened on British TV just about every other week. But, like Rowan Joffe’s just-released Brighton Rock, the new True Grit succeeds in carving out its own niche. This it achieves by returning to the Charles Portis novel, and restoring the character of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld here), the teenage girl who employs the US Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down the murderer of her father, to her position as narrator of the tale. The result is a stylish and involving piece of work that ultimately hits harder and cuts deeper than the original film.

Despite some nicely achieved touches of absurdist humour, there’s a pleasing straightfowardness and lack of self-consciousness to True Grit: you’re immediately pulled into Mattie’s quest, rather than feeling that you’re simply watching the Coens “doing” a Western. Pleasures are many: from Roger Deakins’s beautiful cinematography to the Coens’ astute and unexpectedly affectionate screenplay. And of course there are the three main actors. The remarkable newcomer Steinfeld renders Mattie’s doggedness at once admirable and comic, Matt Damon is funny and surprising as the Texas Ranger, and Bridges’s performance as Rooster is, well, a barn-stormer. They’re superb sparring partners throughout. The Coens’s savvy here even shows in their choice of music to conclude the movie: Iris DeMent’s celestial version of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” playing over the end credits, captures precisely the tone of Protestant stoicism and resilience with which the film is infused. Highly recommended.