Songcatcher

reviewed Sun, 14 Oct 2001

Songcatcher is a well-intentioned but slow-moving film whose main feature is its music (I actually bought the soundtrack before I saw the movie).  Janet McTeer plays Dr. Lily Penleric, a musicologist constantly passed over for promotion at the university where she teaches.  Furious at the latest denial, she storms off to her sister's school in Appalachia (the movie is hazy about the time and place of the movie; it looks like the early 1900s, and Asheville seems to be the nearest city), where she discovers that traditional English folk songs are still alive and well in the isolated mountain communities.  She realizes that publishing a book of these songs could give her the prestige she's looking for, so she begins collecting them.  In the process, she meets many colorful hillbillies (Pat Carroll as Viney Butler is the most entertaining), some of whom are played by musicians like Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal.  She also meets Tom Bledsoe (Aidan Quinn), who is so hostile to her at first and who has such blue eyes that you know they're going to end up together.

As long as the movie sticks to recording the simple, plaintive ballads, it's on sure footing; it's almost like a concert documentary.  The songs are excellently sung and woven into the story; when the most villainous character sings "Conversation with Death" (a variation on "O Death" from O Brother, Where Art Thou), chills went down my spine (by the way, I felt instant affection for the movie when the bad guy makes a point of mentioning he went to UNC).  But the film is weaker when there's no singing.   The various romantic plotlines are perfunctory at best [Tom and Lily go from icy to hot pretty fast, and the lesbian relationship between Lily's sister and her colleague seems more like a device to trigger the (rather melodramatic) denouement than an integral part of the story], and the characters are vague.

McTeer is okay as the stiff, reserved Lily, but she relies a little too much on bugging her eyes out to indicate any emotion from surprise to distaste to ecstasy.  No other performance really stands out, except for Emmy Rossum's as Deladis, an orphaned girl living at the school who quickly gets caught up in Lily's project.  She's terrific, and she has a wonderful singing voice.

I paid $3 for this movie, and that's about right.  It won't lose anything by being seen on a TV screen rather than in the theater.  Probably only the people who enjoyed the O Brother soundtrack and that type of traditional music will really need to see this.

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