The Sounds of Love

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2019)

25 November 2007. MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS (1995) provided the music for a older man. AUGUST RUSH provides the music for a family, a prodigy son lost, an unknowing mother, and a father torn between his family and his love. The themes of music, of love and its loss, of family, of relationships, and betrayal are all on big screen display. Robin Williams plays against type, allowing his presence not to distract from the main story. A lot of the credit must surely go to Freddie Highmore and Keri Russell as well as the director Kirsten Sheridan for delivering a compelling, sweeping, musically sensitive movie. The timing, the pregnant pauses of silence are wonderfully discovered in this movie where the actor and the music are allowed to tell the story. There are no trite over-over excesses. The delivery is direct and sometimes harsh, sometimes wonderfully lyrical. While there is some confusion and clutter towards the end of the movie, overall this movie hits the right notes, a fantasyland of real possibilities, the ideals of motherhood, the ideals of romanticizing the potential of music, of connectivity, of fate, luck, but sheer belief in one's self. Eight out of Ten Stars.
12/7/2017: Freddie Highmore stars in this family drama involving Freddie playing a young boy living in an orphanage who is in love with music and search for his parents who by unfortunate events get separated even before he is born. And it is hopefully through mystery and magic of music that love will somehow find its way among all three of these characters. This amazing and in some ways wishful, fanciful, but entirely romantic and artful movie brings together in one chord various themes from Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist, the music drama of Mr. Holland's Opus (1995), and later the more recent and youthful drama of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011). Robin Williams having attained an established stardom and likely ability of selecting his own roles, boldly offers up a devilish and not so nice character reminiscent of Dicken's Fagin's persona. For those romantics and idealists, this movie is a specular representation of the power of music, imagination, perseverance, and love above all. This is an immensely moving film for those that allow music and family to be those elements that bind humanity together in happiness.