August Rush

Director: Kirsten Sheridan
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard, William Sadler, Leon G. Thomas III, Mykelti Williamson
Running Time: 114 min.
Rating: PG

*** (out of ****)

Most movies these days if you ask me to describe in a few words or less what they are about I can’t do it. What they start out being at the beginning changes totally in the middle and by the end it’s a completely different motion picture than what it started out as. Sometimes, after being bogged down with unrelated sub-plots and useless distractions, it ends as a different genre altogether. This time, for a change, if someone asked me in one sentence to describe what August Rush is about I could actually do it. My answer would be: "It’s about how music touches peoples’ lives." Every scene and every line of dialogue spoken contains within it that message. How the movie delivers that message is a little manipulative, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective.

It’s unabashedly sappy and features some amazingly contrived coincidences that will leave you scratching your head. If someone told me they thought this was the clumsiest screenplay of the year they’d be able to present a lot of solid evidence…at least maybe on the page. What we see and, more importantly, feel on screen is a far different story. The film makes no apologies about what it is and is smart enough not to pretend to be more intelligent than it really is. It’s a modern day fairy-tale and even though it isn’t a conventional musical it sure feels like an excellent one. It even manages to survive a child actor’s performance that borders on being a little creepy. In telling two stories, one more effectively than the other, its intentions are unabashedly pure enough to make you care deeply when they converge at the end. You’re required to take giant leaps of faith and the real gift of this movie is how it makes implausible coincidences feel like fate.

Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore) is a child who lives in his own world. He tunes everything out except the music he hears all around him. It’s this music, he believes, will lead him to his parents from whom he was separated from at birth. We flash back to 11 years earlier and meet those parents, Juliard-trained cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) and aspiring rock singer Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who share a one-night stand that feels like a lot more than that. After giving birth, Lyla’s overprotective, domineering father (William Sadler) with only her career goals in mind, tells her she miscarried and gives the child up for adoption. Louis and Lyla go their separate ways and are forced to wonder what could have been.

Now entrusted into the care of an orphanage, Evan meets child services representative Richard Jefferies (Terrence Howard) who’s impressed with his resolve and wants to find him a family. But there’s only one family Evan is interested in finding and he sets off alone to New York City in hopes of doing it. He hooks up with a street performer named Wizard (Robin Williams) and this is an interesting character. It’s as if Bono from U2 decided that instead of championing for world peace, he’d rather spend his time exploiting small homeless children’s musical proclivities for monetary gain. Only, Evan isn’t like the other kids. He’s a musical prodigy Wizard soon christens with the catchy stage name, "August Rush." Rush’s gift doesn’t go unnoticed by the public for long and Wizard’s self-serving agenda threatens the possibility of Evan finally finding his parents.

This is a movie littered with huge stretches in plausibility that some just may not be willing to buy into. Like how Lyla just happens to discover she has a son at just around the same exact time Louis coincidentally comes down with the sudden urge to track his lost love down 11 years after the fact. Or how then at that very same moment Evan embarks on a road trip to find his parents. Or how the child services rep Lyla runs into just happens to be the one assigned to Evan’s case. How children are free to roam through the apparently crime-free streets of New York City without much consequence. How everyone happens to be at the right place at the right time for the ending of the film. You could write a book on all the contrivances but it would be a waste of time because all of them have little or no negative bearing on a film like this. It’s not misrepresenting itself as anything other than a heartwarming fairy tale, but just because it’s a fairy tale doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hit on some real emotional truths, particularly regarding the stories of Lyla and Louis.

Even though the screenplay presents it in a rather direct, clichéd way the movie touches on idea that sometimes people either through the choices they made in their lives or circumstances that go beyond their control, don’t end up where they imagined they’d be. Things that their life revolved around (in their cases it’s music) slowly disappear and they don’t realize how much it really meant until it’s disappeared completely. It’s interesting where they end up 11 years later and the viewer doesn’t need to put the pieces together as to why they did or how it happened. It’s available to us in the sincere earnestness with which Russell and Rhys-Meyers play their roles. Their first encounter kind of reminded me of the film Before Sunrise, although Louis does manage to bed Lyla in nearly record time and with very few words. Guys everywhere will probably want to pull out their notebooks, but remember, it’s just a movie.

I cared whether Lyla found her son and these two reunited again, even if I can’t say I cared quite as much about Evan. I hate to pick on a child actor because, at such a young age, the director makes most of the big decisions but Freddie Highmore (who previously starred in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland) just isn’t that great here. Part of it could be that the tone of the character is played confusingly, especially in the early stages of the film. He seems to have this blank look on his face as he just stares into the unknown while every once in a while making bizarre one or two word statements that make everyone around him uncomfortable. I think director Kirsten Sheridan was trying to get Highmore to convey Evan’s uniqueness and whimsical nature, but instead there were times where it felt like he belonged in The Shining. We start to wonder if finding this kid’s parents should take a backseat to getting him to the nearest mental hospital for evaluation. Sheridan went a little overboard in trying to tell us he was special which results in him coming off slightly autistic instead. It would have been more emotionally effective if he were just played as a normal, everyday kid with a special gift.

Now this is the Keri Russell performance I’ve been waiting for. August Rush is the second film in the past year she’s starred in dealing with an unexpected pregnancy. I thought Waitress was pretty much a disaster even if Russell’s work in it was serviceable (no pun intended). But I don’t want to see her bitching and complaining about her jerk husband and baking a bunch of pies. It was a good starring role but the material just didn’t seem as suited to her as this and here she gives a performance that’s just about a thousand times better. Unlike that film, this reminded me why the country fell in love with her in the first place on Felicity. One of the more positive developments that will be remembered about 2007 in film was that Russell came back to us and was finally given the opportunity to break through.

Rhys-Meyers also really gets the job done but his role isn’t quite as challenging. I don’t know what’s with Robin Williams. In every comedy he’s in he’s a total train wreck, yet when he’s given even the smallest dramatic role he invests it with something special. This continues that streak. His Wizard character is cartoonish early on but when he takes a dramatic turn later Williams is ready to go there. The film takes on a very Dickensian feel (comparisons to Oliver Twist are unavoidable) and I think one of the big reasons why is because of Williams’ unusual performance in this role. Terrence Howard’s part is smallest of all, but as usual, he turns nothing into something.

I was more absorbed in the story of Louis and Lyla but where movie does really succeed in telling of Evan’s journey is with his musical talents. It’s in the scenes where he hears a symphony in the most mundane everyday sounds like the wind blowing through the wheat field and the basketball hitting the pavement. And it’s when he grabs the guitar and actually begins playing is when the movie truly takes off. Sheridan lets the viewer sees and hears the world through the eyes and ears of this young boy. It helps that in a story about a boy who believes music can guide him to his parents that the actual music in the film is terrific. Mark Mancina’s score compliments every scene perfectly.

Toward the end we’re asked to suspend belief to the absolute highest degree. You just have to fall backwards and trust that the story will catch you. It does. It does because it’s playing by its own fairy tale rules and it doesn’t break them. The ending is absurd. But you know what? I didn’t care. When that magical last scene comes I couldn’t have cared less about certain creative liberties that may have been taken to get there. It was all worth it and you lose yourself in the final minutes.

It’s been a while since a film has split critics and audiences as widely as this one. A lot of critics (who tend to be sticklers for plausibility) just couldn’t make the jump and despised it, while at the same time, it really struck a deep, personal chord in a lot of moviegoers. I’d land somewhere in the middle. I can see both arguments. However, a movie has to be judged for what it’s trying to do, not overanalyzed for what it isn’t. For anyone who loves and feels a deep connection to music, and doesn’t mind a little sappiness, August Rush should probably be considered a must-see.