Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/18/07
Generally
speaking, I think there are two ways to watch a movie: sentimentally
or cynically. The sentimental viewer sees fate where the cynic sees
only contrivance. The sentimentalist demands that the movie “feel”
right while the cynic demands that it be logical. And the sentimental
viewer cries a lot. Unsure which category you fall into? Check
out August Rush, as good a litmus test as has ever been committed
to film. A magical tale of how one separated family's love of music
creates a harmonic convergence that pulls them all toward each other, its'
plot engines are exclusively emotional and cannot be explained other than
to say they made me cry so long and so loud that it's taken Pole Position
in the race for the best movie of the year.
We
first meet young Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore) in a field listening to
the wind and the wheat blowing around him and conducting it all like a
symphony. He's a musical prodigy of the highest order, but he's also
an orphan, and obsessed with the notion that the music he “hears” in his
head would allow his parents to find him if they could only hear him play
it. In flashbacks, we meet those parents, cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri
Russell) and rock guitarist/singer Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers).
Eleven years ago, they met at a party and spent a night of passion on a
rooftop listing to the music of the city. They plan to meet again
the following morning, but Lyla's controlling father Thomas (William Sadler)
intervenes. Heartbroken Louis gives up music, while Lyla finds herself
pregnant. Tragedy follows when she's struck by a car late in the
pregnancy and awakens in the hospital to Thomas telling her she's lost
the baby. But in fact, young Evan survived an emergency delivery
and was put up for adoption by his cold Grandfather, who forged his daughter's
name on the papers. Crushed by the belief that her son is gone, Lyla
also gives up on her musical dreams.
Back
to the present, where Evan decides it's time to find his family and runs
away from the orphanage, armed only with the phone number of kind social
worker Richard Jeffries (Terrence Howard). He arrives in New York
City, and in his amazement at the musical symmetry of the city's constant
noise, Richard's card floats away, leaving the kid entirely alone.
Then he meets young Arthur (Leon G. Thomas III), a skilled street musician.
Arthur brings Evan “home” to a closed theater where a bunch of kids are
under the Dickensian care of Wizard (Robin Williams), who teaches them
music in exchange for 50% of their tips. The moment Evan gets his
hands on a guitar, it's instant magic, and Wizard sees dollar signs.
Seeing missing child fliers around town, he gives the kid a catchy stage
name, August Rush, and convinces him that if anyone learns his real one,
he'll be dragged back to the orphanage. But August's odyssey has
only just begun, and with each step he takes, Lyla and Louis begin to feel
something pulling them back toward that one magical night, and the music,
that binds all three of them together.
Call
it destiny, serendipity or melodrama, but the series of plot dominoes set
up by writers Paul Castro, Nick Castle and James V. Hart would have been
so easy to present as Lifetime Movie nonsense that what director Kristen
Sheridan (daughter of Jim, and an Oscar nominee for the In America
screenplay they both worked on) has done with them is nothing short of
miraculous. Not only does she keep all the plot plates spinning,
but sends them up off their sticks hovering in mid-air: August
Rush is pure cinematic magic. Like O Brother, Where Art Thou,
the movie has music in its' very soul, infusing every frame from the soundtrack
to the shot selections, and I don't know if I've ever seen a movie about
an art form that is so much ABOUT it. Certainly I've never felt as
taken inside the mindset of artistic genuis. Kudos to John Mathieson's
cinematography, William Steinkamp's editing and particularly Mark Mancina's
score: he's one of my favorite movie composers and I'm amazed that
he doesn't work more often.
Credit
to Highmore, Russell, Rhys Meyers and the dozen or so credited experts
who helped them look like legitimate musicians: they make their composing
and playing seem not only joyous but positively spiritual. Evan/August
is a perfect role for Highmore's particular blend of outsider naiveté:
the kid would seem mentally challenged if there wasn't such a light of
genius and joy emanating from him. Russell, who's enjoying
a breakthrough year after the success of Waitress,
is similarly luminous, and every bit up to a role that asks Lyla to be
something of a musical saint. Rhys Meyers gets the most complicated
character, and he does wonders with both the simmering rage Louis feels
at having let both his love and his gift pass him by, and the wonder of
rediscovering both. The roles of Howard and Mykelti Williamson as
a Reverend who briefly takes August in, aren't much on the page, but they
bring great reserves of warmth to them. I can just imagine Sheridan
instructing her actors “Now... GLOW!” In addition to Highmore, she
gets great natural work out of Thomas and Jamia Simone Nash, who's part
of a showstopping gospel performance. As the one character who doesn't
glow, Williams finds a good opportunity to do his thing as a sort of Pied
Piper, but when he shows us Wizard's dark side, all he has to do is swim
against the movie's magical tide and I was ready to run up onto the screen
and kick his ass. Ol' Wizard is lucky this is a family-friendly fairy
tale and so he can't get what he really has coming to him.
If
you've see the August Rush trailer, you have a pretty good idea
of what you're going to get (Good job, Warner Bros. Ad Department:
just imagine if we got more trailers what weren't trying to trick us into
seeing movies we won't like). It's not just sentimental as hell,
it's a movie you're either going to feel in your gut or reject out of hand.
I feel kinda sorry for the cinematic cynics who won't be able to share
this joyous Rush, but then I've never been able to get into the
CBS crime shows they love, so I suppose it all comes out in the wash.
It should probably be The Palace's motto: You Know Who You Are.
And if you're a squishy ol' cry-at-the-movies sentimentalist, run, don't
walk to August Rush. And bring tissue. |
