Begin Again

John Carney, the Irish writer/director of the delightful surprise hit Once (2007), returns in Begin Again to the theme of how music can bring people together and heal emotional wounds. This new, more mainstream film features an all-star cast headed by Mark Ruffalo, as a disgraced record-label A&R man, and Keira Knightley as a broken-hearted singer/songwriter. When the two meet in New York’s East Village they begin a musical collaboration that results in some genuinely enjoyable songs and musical sequences, but a weak movie overall. Unlike the sublime, note-perfect Once, most everything about Begin Again rings false: from its silly depiction of a burnt-out, former big-time music producer’s lifestyle, to its distorted notions about the mechanics of recording and marketing pop music, to its unnatural depiction of how vocals and instruments sound in different environments. Worse is its absurd presentation of events, which unfold, in a ridiculously unrealistic timeline, and its mawkish and oversimplified depictions of relational dynamics.

Once was marketed (and, at least in part, intended) as a kind of down and dirty, low-budget rebuttal to the slick, ultra-polished, Irish commercial hit The Commitments (1991). But what so many who champion Carney's homemade indie over Allen Parker's studio picture seem to miss is that both films succeed beautifully within their own distinctive contexts at capturing something truthful and poetic about how music brings people together. Unlike those earlier pictures, little in Begin Again can be called truthful or poetic. The film is disappointingly corny, insincere, and heavy-handed. Ideas and attitudes that could be clearly inferred and understood without any dialogue are hammered home in scene after scene, speech after speech. To make matters worse, the majority of these sentiments are pretentious, declarative screeds about artistic integrity, commercialism, and remaining "true" to your art, your audience, your loved ones, and yourself. This overwrought preaching would be bad enough in a film that wasn't itself guilty of everything it purports to be an alternative to. Begin Again is just about as inauthentic, processed, and desperately commercial as any film I’ve seen this year.

Carney lays everything on thick in this picture. The viewer is smothered by the onslaught of unnecessary exposition in the film's lengthy set up, and then nearly suffocates by the excessive delivery of its themes in the second half. What Carney doesn't seem to understand is that when you cast an name actor like Ruffalo, you don't need 15 scenes in the beginning to show us how near the end of his rope the character is. Ruffalo brings with him a persona and useful baggage from previous pictures that can convey this bottomed-out quality in a single minute of screen time. If Carney had cast an unknown or gone against type for this role, then maybe he would need some of these early scenes, but not all of them. Ruffalo is a fine actor but he gets buried in this material to the point where his character comes off like a bad caricature. There's a scene near the middle where he storms out of a diner and argues with Knightley about the pain of life that is so badly written it made me want to avert my eyes.

Fortunately, Knightley saves the scene (and many others) with her understated performance. Surprisingly, she is the film’s best aspect. When viewing the trailer or looking at the poster, Knightley might seem an odd choice for this type of role, but she rises to the occasion wonderfully and hits no false notes in both her singing and her depiction of the character. She has always been a splendid actress, and I'm continually shocked by how many people out there hate her. Maybe she's just too young, thin, and beautiful to be taken seriously, but I'm frankly in awe at how authentic she comes across in this completely artificial movie. Her soft, easygoing singing voice is also lovely--reminiscent of the lead singer in the ‘90s pop group The Sundays. 

Begin Again features some catchy songs and a few strong scenes, but as a whole it comes across like a naïve film from the early ‘90s that has not aged well.