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.