Filmmaker John Carney seems to be specializing in a genre that may not have a name. Like his best-known film, Once, this is a musical film that is not a break-into-song musical, but that centers around music and performances that are part of the story. Rather than having musicians act in his film, as in Once, Carney has hired well-known actors. One, Keira Knightley, turns out to sing fairly well (she’s sang on a couple of soundtracks); her co-star, Mark Ruffalo, merely has to play a record-company man who hopes the budding singer-songwriter will turn his career around. Actual recording artists Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine do also act and sing in supporting roles, Levine most prominently as the boyfriend of Knightley’s character.
The reason Once worked so well (spawning an Oscar-winning song and a Tony-winning Broadway musical) was that it surrounded the songs with a naturalistic script that provided emotional context for the songs but didn’t overwhelm them. I wasn’t sure that was going to happen here. Ruffalo plays Dan, such a stereotype of a man going downhill — a scruffy-looking, cynical, drinking-too-much, negligent, divorced father driving an old beater on the streets of New York — that Carney seems to acknowledge the possibilities of cliché. “This isn’t Jerry McGuire,” his onetime record-label partner (Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def) tells the just-fired Dan.
And, in the end, it isn’t. It’s kind of Once redux, but with a different-enough plot that it doesn’t feel like a retread. One thing the two films do have in common is a very romantic storyline anchored by an older man-younger woman pair who are musical — but not romantic — partners, though in each case there is the question of whether the one will turn into the other. And, even more strongly than in the earlier film, Carney makes the case for pop classicism. In the key early scene, after we’ve seen Knightley quietly singing with just her guitar, we see the same scene from Ruffalo’s point of view. Suddenly, the piano begins to play itself, and a violin(!) joins in, turning a passable folk song into a plausible hit song, albeit more plausible in 1974. The imaginary instrumentation borders on being corny, but it’s effective, or nearly so, in persuading the viewer that Dan might after one song be actually dying to sign up the unknown singer.
For reasons explained in the movie, Knightley is not giving her best singing effort in the scene, and she otherwise proves to have a clear, pleasant singing voice that goes along with her fine, expressive acting. While the voice is really hers, the songs attributed to her (and Levine’s character) are actually mostly co-written by Gregg Alexander and Danielle Brisebois, onetime bandmates in the New Radicals. I think at least a few of them, such as the violin-enhanced “Step You Can’t Take Back,” are good enough to catch on in the way that “Falling Slowly,” the Oscar-winning ballad from Once, did. Moreover, Begin Again is charming in the way that Once was, a feel-good film that doesn’t feel like it’s pushing your buttons. It certainly helps if you share Carney’s taste for well-crafted singer-songwriter fare, but the director once again make a compelling case for the emotional power of cinema-enhanced music, or music-enhanced cinema.
IMDb link
viewed 6/26/14 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 7/1/14
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