Fairytale done as realism, classical music portrayed as wonderful

Rating: 10/10 (15 May 2008)

This film was obviously directed by a woman (Kirsten Sheridan) because it is too sensitive to human situations for most men to have been capable of it (men being, as is well known, generally emotional illiterates). So Kirsten Sheridan has done a splendid job. The film is seriously 'politically incorrect' because it is entirely based upon the premise of inherited ability, in this case musical genius. The score here is Nature: 100, Nurture: 0. So the film is thus a welcome balance to the crazed theories of countless social engineers protecting their jobs by maintaining that inheritance ('nature') means nothing and political and social programmes carried out by themselves ('nurture') are all-important. Those of us who are not social workers or political hacks know that perfectly well, and always have done. There is a genre problem about the film which needs to be pointed out. When you make a film like this which is a pure fairytale, you should not really make it in a normal realistic style like this, because realism raises false expectations such as: plausibility, maybe it could really happen, and don't try to convince me of the utterly impossible, but keep it within the bounds of what might happen to real people. These expectations are all dashed, because there is no possibility whatsoever that this story could really happen, as there are too many impossibilities at once, leading to a total collapse of believability. Yes, the film ends on a super-high, but no, the film is also a downer because that super-high is simply impossible. All those strands just can't come together like that at the same moment. It would have been far more subtle and effective to limit the story resolutions, or leave at least one open-ended possibility among many hanging! Freddie Highmore as the young boy delivers a marvellous performance, which is really convincing, and considering how unrealistic the story becomes, that is quite an achievement! Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the two lovers torn apart by a cruel fate are excellent. Marian Seldes is as usual remarkably good, and so solid that she provides part of the architecture. Robin Williams does 'one of his wild things' and does it very well, since when has he ever been normal? The story's main theme of music is a wonderful thing to hear and behold, and the attention given to classical music in a mainstream film like this is so rare that one wonders how they got away with it. In these days of cultural decadence, classical music has become condemned to ghetto status, something only listened to by 'freaky people', i.e., those not obsessed by greed and commerce, and hence abnormal and a danger to the New Society of Mammon, who are soon to be incarcerated and punished by having rap music blared at them 24 hours a day as part of their coming political reeducation process. Dare we hope or think that we might ever get another mainstream film glorifying classical music again? Or is this the end?