pic review

Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo Make Sometimes-Beautiful Music in Begin Again

(L-R) KEIRA KNIGHTLEY and ADAM LEVINE star in CAN A SONG SAVE YOUR LIFE?

Photograph: Andrew Schwartz/The Weinstein Visitor

As he demonstrated in his 2006 striking Once, the Irish writer-managing director John Carney has a touching faith in the idea that culturally and temperamentally dissimilar people tin achieve oneness by making music together. That doesn't exactly make him an outlier in the world of sappy musicals, simply Carney has a knack for giving sentimental showbiz fairy-tales the texture and tang of life on the street, and for knowing when to darken the mood with notes of dissonance. He makes the case once more than that a song tin can relieve your life in his charming musical drama, Begin Again, which opened at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival under the championship Can a Vocal Salvage Your Life? Generic as the new proper name is, I'k glad he lost the old ane, which sounds similar a really terrible reality evidence with Dr. Oz and Ryan Seacrest. And the question is besides rhetorical to generate suspense. If the answer is, "Uh, no, a song can't exercise that," there's no film.

The challenge is that the vocal must be authentic— or then insists the heroine, Gretta (Keira Knightley), a British vocalizer-songwriter jilted by her longtime boyfriend and one-time collaborator, Dave (Adam Levine, of the group Maroon 5), when his solo act breaks big. On the eve of fleeing New York, she gets coerced by a scruffy fellow Brit (James Corden) into playing a vocal during an open-mike event at a bar, where a once-towering recording executive — an A&R human being — named Dan (Mark Ruffalo) is getting stinko. Dan's very bad solar day is the focus of the movie's adjacent section, a flashback. Gretta'southward very bad twelvemonth is the flashback after that. Having given their misery a context, Carney returns to the present and brings Gretta and Dan together for an artistic and emotional rebirth. They don't just need a hitting. They demand to prove to the world that they all the same exist.

Brainstorm Again is very funny, more often than not because Ruffalo makes such an adorably rumpled drunken asshole. Swilling booze while driving through Manhattan and wincing at bad demo tapes, he reminded me of Alan Bates's immortal misanthrope, Butley. Is it a good matter that he and Knightley's Gretta are so mismatched, difficult to imagine in the sack with each other? Perhaps so. Keep it ideal. Focus on the music. Knightley has a surprisingly sugariness singing vox, and when she does that thing where she scrunches up her face and opens her mouth to prove her fangs, she goes in an instant from model-gorgeous to man-goofy.

Ruffalo and Knightely aren't the whole motion picture: At that place has to be a surrogate family to warm up their world. Gretta and Dan assemble musicians (multiracial) around them and hit the streets of New York, the thought being to play each vocal live and outdoors and take hold of the spirit, the actuality, of the metropolis. The conceit would exist more apparent if the numbers didn't audio so exactingly mixed — so processed. I liked Knightley's solo numbers better, especially the stinging 1 she leaves on her ex'south vocalization mail (written by Gregg Alexander) with the refrain, "And you take broken every rule/ And I have loved you, similar a fool." But the near delightful number in the film comes early (too early?): A sotted (and besotted) Dan watches Gretta strum her guitar and hears the vocal the way he'd like it to sound. Drumsticks rise on their own power, an electrical guitar and bass bring together in — information technology's a drunk'south The Sorcerer'south Apprentice.

Amongst the real musicians in the cast, Levine is very proficient at convincing you lot he's a douche, and Cee Lo Green has an amusing scene in which he shows off his luxurious digs while swearing fealty to Dan, who discovered him. An player by the name of Yasiin Bey (he looks uncannily like the singer Mos Def and another actor, Dante Beze) is all sleek self-containment as Dan's chilly ex-partner. Hailee Steinfeld holds just enough back to exist convincing as Dan's disappointed teenage daughter. (Information technology's odd, though, that Carney is under the weirdly patriarchal impression that teen girls who dress in ultra-short shorts and skimpy tops are crying for Daddy's intervention.) Simply Catherine Keener (equally Dan'south ex) deserved better than another bedraggled, aging Earth Mother; Carney can't seem to figure out what to do with her. Of form, it's always possible that Harvey Weinstein cutting her scenes.*

Really, I'd have backed Harvey if he'd taken a pair of scissors to the denouement that runs over the closing credits — a fine, stick-it-to-the-Man idea that needed more fourth dimension and plays similar outtakes. Simply I know why it's there. Carney's specialty is inching toward clichés, backing away from them, and inching back. He's not as pure every bit he thinks he is, but the footsie is very entertaining.

* Clarification: A representative from The Weinstein Company contacted me to say that there were no additional scenes with Catherine Keener'south character that were were per directives from Harvey Weinstein. I guess the fault lies not in our distributor, but in our screenplay.

Motion-picture show Review: Begin Again