Sentimental Comedy Overwhelmed with Unmemorable Tunes

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2016)

Sometimes you just know when a film isn't for you. This is not the same experience as watching a "bad" film, with deficiencies of script, characterization and directorial technique. The issue centers over questions of taste: what viewers expect from a film and what they are actually presented with.
This is certainly the case with John Carney's BEGIN AGAIN. The plot is straightforward: Brit expat Gretta (Keira Knightley) has a long- term relationship with Dave (Adam Levime) which crashes on the rocks when Dave is catapulted to stardom and has a brief fling with publicist Mim (Jennifer Li). Gretta meets accidentally with washed- up producer Dan (Mark Ruffalo) in a New York bar, and after an iffy start, the two of them agree to produce a do-it-yourself album of Gretta's songs, with the help of amateur musicians, Dan's daughter Violet (Hailee Stanfield), and some of Dan's acquaintances in the music business. The plot is an old one, a recycling of the "Let's Put on a Show" genre historically associated with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals of the Thirties.
The leading actors try their best with a shallowly-written script, but nonetheless Ruffalo's Dan comes across as someone entirely responsible for his own decline due to impatience and a fondness for alcohol. Knightley's Gretta is a passive figure, although apparently a talented song-writer, and she really cannot sing.
Yet the potential for character-development is set aside in a film with far too many unmemorable musical numbers for its own good. On several occasions viewers yearn for the singing to end and the plot to resume.
There remain one or two incidental pleasures: Carney's use of New York locations communicates something of the city's infinite riches, although we could have done without the clichéd sequence in Times Square. James Corden rehearses his familiar role of a bouncy best friend (in his pre-LATE LATE SHOW incarnation).