Reflects a world of creativity and spiritual connection

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2008)

Bullied by older boys in an orphanage, Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore) is an eleven-year old who believes that his parents are still alive and that he can reach out to them through the power of music. Kirsten Sheridan's August Rush is an example of the genre known as magical realism and is best viewed as an inspired fable. Though there is precious little realism, the combination of exuberant music, the outstanding performance of Freddie Highmore plus solid supporting stints by Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Terence Howard make August Rush a very enjoyable and often moving experience in spite of its logical disconnects.
In flashback we find out that Evan's parents, cellist Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell) and Irish rock singer Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) met in Greenwich Village and had a meeting of the minds and bodies together on a rooftop while trying to escape from a boring party. Their relationship is thwarted, however, by Lyla's stern father (William Sadler) who, after the pregnant Lyla is hit by a car and gives birth prematurely, tells her that her baby has died. Unaware that the boy is still alive and has been sent to an orphanage by her father, Lyla and Louis abandon their careers. Lyla moves to Chicago to become a music teacher and Louis becomes a businessman in San Francisco. We pick up on their lives eleven years later (neither seems to have aged in the process).
Unwilling to be placed with a foster family, Evan runs away from the orphanage and becomes involved with a group of street musicians in Washington Square Park. In the scenes in Greenwich Village, director Kristen Sheridan has given us a lovely vision of New York reminiscent of her father's "In America", and also of Steven Zaillian's "Searching for Bobby Fischer". It is here that Evan discovers that he has natural musical ability as he picks up a guitar and entertains the gathering crowd for a sizable payday. Asking another young busker for a place to stay, he is routed to an abandoned theater where, in the tradition of Oliver Twist, he meets other musicians who are sent out on the street to play for money by an overbearing Fagin-like Robin Williams whom they call the Wizard.
When you think the string of unlikely events has reached its limits, Evan, now called August Rush, finds a church choir of angelic magnitude where a pastor with connections sends him to the Julliard School of Music and a concert in Central Park playing music that he has composed. While events stretch our credulity, August Rush at its core is not about the story but about possibility. With its theme of tuning in to the world around us and opening ourselves to its music, it may just be the first film that anticipates a world reflecting a consciousness that is not governed by logic but by creativity and spiritual connection. If this strikes you as so much nonsense, you may want to avoid this film.