At least according to this drama, a musical partnership is like a group marriage. Maintaining it for many years requires a harmony among the members as carefully attended to as a Beethoven score. A sour note from any can affect the whole. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ivanir, a quartet as accomplished as their fictional counterparts, play the title characters, who are collectively called The Fugue. Their successful 25-year union is threatened first by the unavoidable, a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, but this destabilizing news indirectly allows a series of personal and professional differences to surface.
Only a few people have professional lives as important to them as their personal ones. These people have all, in some measure, placed the group before themselves. Two of them, played by Hoffman and Keener, have put the needs of the group before the daughter they share (Imogen Poots), and perhaps their own relationship. Hoffman’s character has literally played second fiddle for decades for the sake of group harmony, though he believes himself equally qualified to play either violin part. The other violinist (Ivanir) has avoided emotional entanglements in the pursuit of perfectionism. And even Walken’s character, one of the least eccentric, most sympathetic men, in his filmography, places the group above his own love of playing, wishing to bow out before his decline is noticeable.
The other theme in the movie more directly involves music. (Incidentally, while there are a few significant musical performances in the movie, including one by the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, there are not that many, perhaps due to the difficulty of syncing the actors’ movements to the soundtrack.) The first violinist wants to try playing a familiar piece without a score. The second violinist prizes perfection over spontaneity, heavily annotating his own sheet music. The movie appears to suggest that there is value in both approaches.
IMDb link
viewed 10/7/12 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/11/12
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