unmusical

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2008)

August Rush is, from one vantage point, a quintessentially mainstream film. It's a feel-good movie. As such, it's slickly polished into something that will be digestible to a wide audience - the downside of which is that somewhat generic quality that pervades films which swim safely in the shallow end of the pool. Of course, being commercial doesn't make a film bad. This one will have its audience, and there is enough emotion and good intention there to give the right movie-goer the quasi catharsis he or she is looking for.
To my mind, though, this film has a fundamental, glaring problem. It centers itself thematically around music, yet it demonstrates a thorough lack of musical understanding. People who have never considered nor been exposed to the processes behind music might not notice a problem, but to those who have, the film's central character will more closely resemble a comic-book-superhero version of a musician than any musician, genius or no, who has ever lived.
This young lad's extraordinary ability (to reach professionalism at any instrument, and even theory\notation, within seconds of coming into contact with it for the first time) is only a symptom of the problem. Another is the film's complete lack of effort to realistically correlate the music being produced with the way the instruments are being played. For instance, the camera may close in on a hand playing ascending notes on a piano, and yet we hear descending notes. Or more glaringly, an intricate song may be formed by swinging both arms at the strings of a guitar without even dealing with frets. In another scene, synthetic sounds are used in the score to represent real instruments being played.
This sort of thing is common in a lot of commercial cinema, and I can usually accept it. The reason I can't here is that this film purports to be ABOUT music, yet is entirely ignorant and pedestrian in its representation of it.
Floating somewhere near the heart of the problem is the fact that neither the music in the film, nor the film's fallacious representation of the musical process, does anything to convey the true depth and power of music, even remotely, despite some early dialog which suggested it may at least scratch the surface. To every musician watching the film, it will be glaringly obvious that the director is not a musician, nor truly passionate about music, and should therefore not have directed the film.
Here, in my belief, lies the biggest mistake of the Hollywood system - When the primary force determining what project gets made, and by whom, is money, filmmakers are rarely expressing their own voice. I don't remember the last time I saw a Hollywood film which genuinely felt like it was the vision of an artist who really had something to say.
Perhaps this film actually was written by someone who loves and understands music and wanted to convey something about it, but the fact that you can't tell simply by watching the film is a testament to its failure.