Nobody grows up in Florida, unless they're an orange

Rating: Null/10 (20 October 2011)

"Music and Lyrics" finds the usually intolerable Hugh Grant playing a washed up pop singer who meets a young songwriter, played with customary cuteness by actress Drew Barrymore. As per formula, he's cynical about music and the music industry, but her optimism, love and energy rekindles his zest for art and life. They fall in love, break apart, and then get married, the film climaxing with Grant writing a song for Drew and then revealing it to her on stage in front of a crowd of thousands.
It's your standard boy meets girl, boy loses girls, boy gets girl back formula. What's different here is that the film has been deliberately reverse engineered, the film-makers starting with a very specific set of problems: how to get a guy and girl romantically writing songs and singing for one another, and how to climax the film with the guy expressing his love to the girl via song in front of a large public audience. As cinema and music, or rather pop-cinema and pop-music, largely define man's understanding of love and romance, the intention here is to tap into a kind of ultra romance, director Marc Lawrence trying to create a more mainstream version of what John Carney did a year earlier with his indie film "Once" (also another Barrymore project, "The Wedding Singer").
The film is at its best when its satirising 1980s glamour and pop music. It also pokes fun at the contemporary music scene (many young, oversexed, dumb pop stars gyrating for their rumbustious fans), but such jabs are less funny. As with most of these films, the climax must be a public event, we the audience watching as an audience watches our heroes. This both enfolds us in the drama and taps into a kind of primal need for public validation.
Usually with these films the female role is given to a foreigner, someone verbally impaired. It's the male character who masters language and is in a position of linguistic dominance. Here Barrymore is the master of words and Grant's the stammering goof-ball.
Note that both actors are all surfaces. They're constantly blasting us with ultra cute, ultra romantic, ultra bashful, ultra suggestive, don't-you-want-to-just-kiss-me-now poses. Every gesture, pose and inflection is relentlessly calculated. Barrymore's an old hand at this now. Grant too. Love is itself a game of broadcasted and exchanged signs.
7.9/10 – Romantic comedies, keeping the human species breeding since 1909. Worth one viewing.