The Perfect Musical

Rating: 10/10 (12 October 2008)

The string between bona fide sweetness and sappy over-romanticizing in movies is very difficult to describe, but Robert Wise's masterful and infinitely entertaining musical epic The Sound of Music is not a minor instance. The depiction of that meager good, true purity, is so superbly played by the supreme cast. There is not one moment where I feel like I'm watching plaster-smiled caricatures that come along with so many musicals. What I cherish so much about this film is its happiness and its meaning, its characters' feet being relatively close to the ground and yet their heads up in the clouds.
The music of Rodgers and Hammerstein has been overlooked for being beneath the benchmark of their generation like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein and others, but it is also unquestionable that their work on this, the perfect musical, have endured the trial of decades for the utter aptness of point in time and situation of the infectious songs that support the dramatic course, that are actually a part of the stream of the story, rather than interrupting it in its path like Singin' In the Rain. And their intrinsic catchiness carries on with both school and professional musical theater in innumerable revivals.
The musical numbers work magic visually, as the choreography is sometimes almost logistically impossible, but not in that it uses any special effects. Many musicals would either be much better without the music or much better without the story. The Sound of Music's fun and energizing music is inborn. I would not have the story any other way. It would hardly work.
Taking place in Austria's beautiful countryside, Maria, played by Julie Andrews, is studying to become a nun but is not sure if convent life is right for her. She's just too musical and spontaneous. Can you blame her? So she is sent to be the governess to seven children, ranging in age from sixteen to five, of an overzealous widower naval commander, Captain von Trapp, played with seamlessly masked resentment by the great Christopher Plummer. Maria and the Captain right away conflict on the way the children are cared for. The Captain has been raising them in keeping with the ethics of military authority, whereas Maria wants them to take pleasure in life as children. In spite of the children being initially naughty and unwelcoming to Maria, in spite of Plummer's overwhelming rigidity, we love them all immediately.
Would a Captain whose wife has passed away not find the naval discipline that he'd been living with for so long to be his first mechanism against the pain and heartbreak of his wife's death? And is that not an indirect manner of showing love to his children, by making their lives so strict and systematic that they cannot take the time to reflect on what life is like without a mother? The Von Trapp family is lovingly developed and, as should be the perogative of any story by no means excluding musicals, are the footing for the rest of the story.
The reason The Sound of Music works so wonderfully well is because we are lost in the same perfect world with this unique but natural little family in which love, music and beauty are one, and then when the outside world doesn't slow down for them, we are there with them.