Music of the Heart is directed, in a by-the-numbers, very-special-episode style, by Wes Craven, but that doesn't mean, as a friend of mine suggested, that the little kids start running around stabbing people with their violin bows. More's the pity. No, this is Wes's attempt to find his inner Sydney Pollack, much as the-director-formerly-known-as-artist Sam Raimi did with For Love of the Game. Meryl Streep plays an inexperienced teacher who, when her husband leaves her for another woman, takes a job in a public school in East Harlem teaching music to your standard movie assortment of multi-culti, underprivileged kids. It's based on a true story previously filmed as the documentary Small Wonders.
Now stand back as I prepare to spew bile. This movie couldn't be more clichéd if it opened with "Once upon a time..." Instead, it opens with a sappy ballad and a floating collage of wedding and family photos, and I felt my heart sink. This is going to suck, I thought. That feeling grew to an overwhelming certainty as I watched Streep's plucky character, Roberta, win over the initially reluctant school principal with her moxie and her cute-as-a-button kids. Then we get to go meet the sassy-but-adorable kids she'll be teaching, stock character types all, and we get to hear the godawful screeching of inept violin playing.
Music of the Heart plays like a cross between Kindergarten Cop and "Touched by an Angel." Roberta magically solves the problems of everyone she meets. There's the black pride mother who takes her son out of the violin class because there are no famous black violinists and she doesn't want her son to learn "dead white people's music." But one talk with Roberta and lo! the mother sees the light and humbly asks if her son can get back in the class. Who's that in the corner? Why, it's a big-eyed little girl with leg braces! She says with meek wistfulness, "I'll always be weaker than the others." But two words from Roberta, and she instantly grows a backbone of steel. Send this gal to East Timor and they'll all be holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" inside of a week!
And yet, she's not a very likable or smart character. She falls for Aidan Quinn, despite his breathtaking insensitivity (when they first kiss and she suggests that maybe she shouldn't fall into bed with him just yet, considering she's still technically married and all, he snaps, "What do you think your husband's doing right now?" When he abruptly leaves town the morning after sleeping with her for the first time, he mocks her dismay: "What, did you think we were gonna get married this morning or something?" When she asks him if he'd ever cheat on her, he laughs).
After 45 minutes, the movie finally started to seem like it was winding up, and I thought the sudden conflicts with her kids and with the contractors renovating her house were just stuck in there to pad it out to an even hour. Of course, there's the triumphant spring concert, where all the little moppets play perfectly, and all the naysayers grow shiny-eyed with joy, and then the psychotic bats come pouring out of the rafters and begin their revenge. I wish. No, instead the sappy music swells and everyone stands up cheering. And silly me, I thought the "10 years later" scene that came up next was just an epilogue. Twenty minutes later I realized we were only halfway through the film. The whole cycle began again; the sassy kids who bend, awestruck, to Roberta's power (when they find out they'll be in her class, they even fling their arms patronizingly about their less-fortunate classmates as though they just won the Miss America crown); the screeching, the screeching, oh god, not the screeching again!
Anyway, we reach a scene where Roberta's sons place a personal ad for her ("late 30s," my ass). I saw only two possible outcomes to this particular story line, neither of which I could stomach, neither of which involved psychotic bats, neither of which would give Streep any opportunity to say, "Dingo et my baby": either long-lost Aidan Quinn would reply to the ad, and/or the perfect man would. So I left.
Do I even need to sum up what I think of this movie in one sentence?
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