Not a breakthrough, nor a disturbing masterpiece, but a masterful entertainment--a great musical!

Rating: 9/10 (25 September 2009)

The Sound of Music (1965)
Not a breakthrough, nor a disturbing masterpiece, but a masterful entertainment--a great musical!
Rogers and Hammerstein need no praise from me, and their work for The Sound of Music is so embedded in everyone's head--do, re, mi--they border on timeless, without exaggeration. Starting as a smash 1959 Broadway musical and running for years (followed by years in London), it was only a matter of time before Hollywood put together a smash widescreen version.
Director Robert Wise was a perfect choice in some ways. Despite years of making less fanciful movies (I Want to Live, for one), he had one notch on his belt worth noting: West Side Story. And so the 70mm cameras were pulled out and the Austrian Alps hosted the cast and crew for the location shooting (the rest was shot mostly in Hollywood). A legendary film was born, Julie Andrews rose higher into the firmament, and the whole world was singing "My Favorite Things." It doesn't get any better than that.
As a movie--the editing, shooting, acting, and so on--it is surprisingly good without being one bit original or breathtaking. It is famously saccharine, and the question is mostly whether you can stomach some very very sweet (some would say goody-goody) scenes. But listen, this is a musical, and musicals are like that--false and arch and absurd and dreamy. That's one reason we make them and watch them. The plot is a terrific romance, really--it develops predictably, but slowly, with delicious restraint. And it has the best of antagonists, too--cold hearted Nazis. The famous ending, and I mean the very end, after the convent scene at night, is weirdly brief, and shot from so far away you only get the gist of things, not any actual faces or reactions. Maybe this makes its message of hope and perseverance more universal.
But all this said, it is surely the music itself that makes this movie astonishing. I have seen the movie too many times to count, but hadn't seen it recently, and as one familiar song after another came up, I heard melodies that felt as right as a good hat, lyrics that rolled into the air like laughter. It is all easygoing stuff, for sure, but slyly sophisticated, much more difficult to pull off than you can imagine (ask Stephen Sondheim). And even if Julie Andrews isn't your cup of tea, she sings with such clear ease, and in tune, and without a lot of self-conscious warbling. The music, from her, permeates the movie as fully as the scenery.
Is it a perfect movie? Oddly, it is perfect at what it does, which sounds like I'm saying "it is what it is" and I don't mean to be silly. I mean, it wants to be a family movie filled with sentiment and warmth and uncomplicated psychology. And lots of great music. And it does that to a tee. It's hard to complain that it doesn't raise social issues, or the photography is pretty but stiff as masonite, or the acting is clichÃ©d, or the plot is saccharine (yes). All of these are true, but that's like complaining that the songs in a gangster film aren't sweet enough. The Sound of Music is an engrossing, perfect, heartwarming experience if you let it be. It's a musical, remember, just a terrific musical.