Film Carew: Begin Again, Some Velvet Morning

BEGIN AGAIN

Can a song save your life? Not if it’s as awful as the songs in Begin Again. John Carney’s eight-years-on follow-up to Once is another music-centric portrait of a down-on-his-luck man-with-a-beard fatefully meeting a wandering waif from far away, but the no-budget vérité of his breakout movie has given way to an All-American barney boasting bankable stars (Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley) and celebrity turns (Adam Levine, Cee-Lo Green). That the cast is populated by figures from the realm of reality-TV karaoke contests should be due warning to any right-listening viewer. The strum-and-wail earnestness of Once’s Glen Hansard is a lifetime ago; even if, dramatically, Begin Again leans on the experiences of Hansard and Carney, unassuming Irishman both, being whisked into a post-Once world of awards-shows and Broadway adaptations and music-biz opportunities.

Begin Again feels like a cautionary tale, a warning about how an industry can suck up an individual —and what made them individual— and turn them into a generic product; something that the actual drama presents as a version of ‘making it’. The songs heard herein were presided over by songwriter-for-hire Gregg Alexander (of the New Radicals), but they’re usually the work of a crew of songwriters; the dramatised take on individualism undermined by the film’s committee-thinking approach, from its music to its title.

Can A Song Save Your Life? was the original title of the picture, before it invariably got shelved by that movie-biz tendency towards titular banality (my favourite possibly-apocryphal anecdote re: such is that The Studio tried to force Steven Soderbergh to have Erin Brokovich retitled Cause & Effect). It’s a reference, assumedly, to the first fated instant Roofy sees Knightboat on stage at an open-mic night. He’s a one-time music-biz mogul who’s lost his wife, his record label, and his sanity; a drunken wreck who drives around in the ambulant symbol of a beaten-up Jaguar, its luxurious lustre long lost, its once-fine lines now dented. When at his lowest ebb, her song lifts his spirits, and presents a raison-d’être: they must make an album together! Carney’s elegant opening act circles this moment three times over, offering a pleasingly non-linear approach that is, come act two, duly abandoned; another moment in which individualism gives way to the familiar.

This moment they meet sounds the alarm-bells almost instantly: Ruffalo’s mogul imagining Knightboat’s spartan compositions as blown-out arrangements, immediately talking about shit-hot producers and session musicians and killer videos. Knightley, however, has no interest in fame, and wants to do things on her own terms; eventually self-recorded and self-releasing an album recorded on the streets. That premise probably sounds sweet enough, but seeing the totems of genuine indie spirit reduced to empty dramatic placeholders in a corporate comedy is horrifying; anyone who loves, say, Vincent Moon’s on-the-street videography likely to shed tears when Knightley and her rag-tag crew of session-musicians-in-spirit roll tape in New York alleys and subway stops. Begin Again makes a big point of talking about the ‘ambient sound’ element of its live-band field-recordings, but the recordings that arise when the band starts to jam have a buffed studio sheen; the blown-out sound of actually really recording on a rooftop suspiciously absent from the final album Knightley Bandcamps for a new-music-distro-model-symbolising $2 a pop.

Knightley is at her worst when going for big emotions...her few unfortunate moments of wounded, tear-stained sadness as convincing as the film’s on-the-street bona fides.

Whilst the musical element is horrifying, there’s enough storytelling wrinkles to make Begin Again not a complete artistic wasteland. Hailee Steinfeld and Catherine Keener bring both actorly weight and a lightness-of-touch to what could be generic angry-teenage-daughter/estranged-wife roles. New Late Late Show host James Corden is so effective as comic-relief that he seemingly makes the ever-stiff, self-conscious, meta-theatrical, high-waisted Knightley loosen up and laugh. Knightley is at her worst when going for big emotions —her turn David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Mind is howlingly bad— and, here, she largely gets to play things easy and breezy; her few unfortunate moments of wounded, tear-stained sadness as convincing as the film’s on-the-street bona fides.

Her character, though, gets to dodge familiar dramatic potholes: Roofy and Knightboat may be star-cross’d, but they never become lovers; their flowering friendship existing in a place of male/female equals that, whilst it may tilt towards flirtation, doesn’t require consummation. Similarly, Levine plays Knightley’s sell-out ex-boyfriend, a figure from her past that she can’t shake, if only because they used to share songwriting credits. He, too, is a figure that Carney doesn’t demand his heroine kiss, but merely navigate; and, eventually, get over (and, oh, may we soon get to the day in which a drama in which a woman finds herself by willingly choosing to go it solo didn’t seem so rare). Begin Again used to have a question-mark in its title, and it manages to preserve that in its emotional drama, Carney allowing some things to remain open-ended. Yet, it’s only ‘some’, as most things do get second-guessed and overdetermined, the fact that the question-mark never made it to the finished movie symbolising a film that feigns independence whilst sounding cowed.

SOME VELVET MORNING

Some Velvet Morning is a Neil LaBute movie. And how. Operating somewhere near the realm of self-parody, the once-hot-shot-playwright returns to the men-vs-women métier with which he made his name. It’s a locked-room stageplay in which Stanley Tucci turns up on the brownstone doorstep of his former mistress Alice Eve, bags in hand; a desperate man broiling with a toxic mixture of hope, horniness, and vengeance. He’s, of course, an unrepentant asshole, an entitled white-man out to fuck the world, and every young minx in it. She’s equal parts victim and vixen, passive-aggressively engaging in Tucci’s power-games both for the pleasure and the pain. Across 80 body-language-attuned, verbally-vicious minutes, they bicker and banter, harangue and argue, parry and thrust.

With a twist that throws all LaBute’s familiar misogyny and misanthropy back at the feet of the viewer.

There’s a meta quality to the whole thing, the characters filled with a stagey self-awareness, the form of the drama lingering in the text. The spectre of male violence lingers, as does the promise that things will end badly (“didn’t you read Lolita?” Tucci marvels, in a moment of blessed lightness). They do, but with a twist that throws all LaBute’s familiar misogyny and misanthropy back at the feet of the viewer; a minor sleight-of-hand that’s only just enough to justify the film’s existence.