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This may be too obvious to have come up in discussion over your intravenous espresso this morning, but there’s a good reason Kid Rock won’t get to call himself the Fourth Tenor any time soon. Likewise, why Pavarotti will probably never replace KR’s twerp sidekick (other than, if Luciano were to take a flying leap into the mosh pit, the human toll is far too terrible to contemplate): artists (the Tenors) and entertainers (the Kid) tend to specialize. Once they’ve had enough success to start getting bored, though, they look for other avenues of expression. Especially if whatever talent they may have has somewhere been critically disparaged, they develop an urge to take off in a completely different direction, seeking recognition as a true auteur. Unfortunately, the fact that they’ve made enough money to afford experimentation also means they’re too rich and powerful for enough people to brave suggesting they’d be better off sticking to what they know.
Well, let me publically offer a bit of advice to Wes Craven, who’s done pretty well for himself as a horror director since that fateful day, years before the Freddy Krueger and Scream movies, when Siskel and Ebert ensured his future by calling his exploitative 1972 debut The Last House on the Left the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen: man, the next time you feel a need for validation, settle for getting your parking ticket stamped. Meanwhile, leave art to the artists.
Craven’s latest movie (isn’t that a band name?), the one he should have gotten second and third opinions about, is Music of the Heart, the mostly true* story of violin teacher Roberta Guaspari (Meryl Streep). An itinerant Navy wife/mom coming off traumatic separation from her philandering sailor husband, Roberta finds herself seeking work for the first time in several years. At the suggestion of her bohemian new boyfriend (Aidan Quinn), she takes a job as substitute music teacher at an East Harlem elementary school run by a typically harried inner-city principal (Angela Bassett) who appreciates the arts enough to give her a chance; it doesn’t hurt that Roberta has her own violins.
Despite teaching one of the most challenging musical instruments in one of the toughest environments for learning -- and being rather disagreeable herself (my dad used to say that the three most difficult kinds of people to get along with are teachers, preachers, and military personnel, because they’re all used to being in charge and getting their way; Roberta is one-and-a-half of those three) -- she gradually earns the grudging respect of parents, co-workers, and students. Inspired by her success, she buys a house in the neighborhood, and with her two young sons puts down roots for the first time in her adult life.
Jump to 1993, ten years later. Acerbic single-mindedness means the family is still just a threesome, but a thousand students have enjoyed both the rewards and discipline attendant to her string classes, to the extent that an excess of applicants means candidates must now be selected by lottery. When a sudden budget crunch threatens to cancel the program, grateful parents and supportive press pitch in to organize a concert to raise the difference. What starts out as a simple event at the Y mushrooms into an all-star gala at Carnegie Hall, featuring such resin-and-horsehair luminaries as Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, and Mark O’Connor.
Which is a wonderful story. Inspiring, even. Who would’ve thought it would make for such a mediocre movie.
For starters, Craven works from a screenplay that, though written by Pamela Gray, who with A Walk On the Moon scripted one of my favorite films this year, is an uneven, disjointed melange of drama, tragedy, art, romance, and too little light-heartedness. Roberta fights with her overly protective mother (Cloris Leachman), her overly protected kids, her lover, her principal, the thieving alcoholic ex-cons she hires to renovate her house on the cheap, parents, and all the other teachers except one played by Gloria Estefan, who wanders into her first scene as if her tour bus just pulled up at the curb. Scenes jump around abruptly with little or no set-up, like excerpts from a schizoid’s diary, and don’t really settle down to a coherent narrative until near then end, by which time I was distracted by how much the glow from my digital watch resembles the eerie neon lights you see under those cars that look like they ran over a kryptonite speed bump. All of which is compounded by the direction, which, apparently in an attempt to get as far as possible from his horrific roots, is woefully sappy and unsubtle. Beginning with a snapshot sequence over opening credits set to the hopelessly maudlin title tune by ‘N Sync, the whole affair is far more appropriate to something you’d see on Lifetime. The film can’t even be saved by the considerable dramatic talents of Ms. Streep, who sports a deer-in-headlights look as if all this stuff is really happening to her personally. Maybe things wouldhave been more interesting if Roberta’s husband and the school board were stalked by a machete-wielding masked maniac.
Fortunately, the subject has been already been treated much better, if fictionally, in Mr. Holland’s Opus. And Mr. Craven went back to horror with Scream 3, which will be out in February. C
*I say mostly true because the actual school whose name was appropriated for the film’s setting has complained of being depicted in a subplot about drive-by shooting as much worse than reality.
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