Dad Jokes: POWER BALLAD and THE BREADWINNER

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and see a light story about plausible people in slightly implausible scenarios adjacent to real life. Like if your life had a sprinkling of movie magic over it, you might stumble into something like this, too. That’s something that Irish writer-director John Carney seems to understand well when he gets the formula exactly right in building his light dramas that are lifted to something closer to transcendence through the power of music. It was there in his intimate, casual street-busker romance from 2006, Once, and in his 80s coming-of-age garage band musical from 2016, Sing Street. And it’s there again in his latest: Power Ballad. (I guess he gets it right exactly once every ten years.) It stars Paul Rudd as an expat American singer-songwriter working as the front man to a wedding band. He gave up his dreams of stardom to settle down in a Dublin suburb with an Irish wife and daughter. But he never stopped writing. This is the part that is definitely believable. 

The slight fantasy of the movie is that his band gets a gig at the reception for the childhood best friend of a former boy band member. Wouldn’t you know it that the fading celeb (played by an aptly cast Nick Jonas) is planning a comeback and is in town to write his new album? He shows up at the wedding, jams with the band, and connects with Rudd. They have fun buddy chemistry as they share some works in progress with each other and part ways feeling good about meeting a simpatico artist. Six months later, Rudd hears one of his songs over the speakers at the local mall. The star stole his song. Carney explores the ramifications with a degree of generosity to both men, and watches as the one’s anger and the other’s guilt keep them apart. But the movie’s light tone and strain of good humor—not to mention the great original songs—make some kind of happy ending inevitable. That might keep the movie’s scope, and emotional range, small, but there’s something so deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled sentimental script go through its paces with likable leads and catchy tunes. It’s the John Carney special. 

Even lighter and less substantial is The Breadwinner. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t satisfy in its own way. Starring and co-written by standup comedian Nate Bargatze, it’s a down-the-middle sitcom of the sort that comics of his observational, family friendly kind would do all the time in the 80s and 90s on TV and the big screen. As such, it has a throwback, even retrograde, premise. He’s a husband, a father, and a well-meaning oaf. His wife (Mandy Moore) has a great business opportunity, care of a sequence in which the Shark Tank judges play themselves. (I'd say part of the fantasy here is that her invention would even get a deal.) Now she has to leave for two weeks to launch her product, which means he needs to be the sole parent to their three adorable daughters. Hijinks ensue. If you’re already imagining burnt toast, laundry shenanigans, and driving the wrong way to school, you have the right idea. It might seem a little unusual to imagine a dad so far out of the loop these days. But this isn’t a movie about all dads; it’s a movie about this dad. And Bargatze makes a believably unaware guy. His standup works because of its low-key befuddlement, like an affable guy who’s slowly learning about how to process his own life. Though obviously his observational style relies on some intelligent comprehension, he knows how to approach everyday problems with an unassuming gee-didja-notice? attitude. He has the right slightly stunned look to sell the well-meaning confusion. 

He brings to the movie that sense of middle class bewilderment, and a gooey sentimentality about the love of family that draws a guy out of his bubble of privilege and into fuller responsibility. It helps that the kids are so cute, and the jokes are actually pretty funny—bolstered by a supporting cast including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kate Berlant, Zach Cherry, Kumail Nanjiani. It has all the charms of the throwbacks it’s copying, with a little Everybody Loves Raymond here, a little Home Improvement there. But it has mercifully none of the gender anxiety the premise might provoke. He genuinely doesn’t mind that his wife has to be the main breadwinner and wants to help her. He’s just not used to doing without the valuable co-parenting work she’s been providing. It feels, if not exactly true to life, true to some lives. Like the Adam Sandler movies of twenty years ago, it’s cleanly shot, stuffed with silly asides, and loaded up with product placement. (Thanks, Toyota, KFC, and Walmart, I guess.) It's not vulgar or crass, just sweet and gentle. We don’t get live action comedies in theaters much, and certainly not family friendly ones. It’s nice to remember what it’s like to be in room of people chuckling along with one that gets the job done. 

Music of the Heart: SING STREET

Writer-director John Carney is apparently on a mission to make earnest sentimental movies about the power of music bringing people together and helping nice people discover their passions. His latest is Sing Street, a return to his native Ireland after a jaunt to Hollywood for the slick and phony music business-set Begin Again. The perfect middle ground between that and his raw and tender debut film, the great busker romance Once, his new effort is a conventional and conventionally appealing music picture. It’s about a scrappy group of lower-class kids with big dreams, misfits and outcasts who, in making music together, find common cause and cause for hope. It’s set in the late 80s, so the kids find inspiration in the likes of Duran Duran, a-ha, and The Clash, heavy on the driving electric synths and keyboards, splashy snares, spacious soaring vocals, and energetic bass. (It’s not the Beatles, one father grumbles, funny because we’re farther from the 80s than they were the 60s.) The movie makes familiar plot moves, but gets exactly right the sense of youthful discovery, where music isn’t just a key part of identity, but new and alive with possibility.

Our lead is Cosmo, a meek 15-year-old boy (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in an engaging screen debut) whose parents (Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen and Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy) announce a budget crunch. This takes him out of a nice Jesuit school and into a cruel one operating on a harsher brand of Catholicism. He’s immediately unhappy, a target for the bullies amongst peers and priests alike. Good thing he gets an immediate crush on a cool dropout girl (Lucy Boynton) and thinks up an icebreaker on the spot: “Want to be in a music video?” She says yes, so he runs back to the one pal he’s managed to befriend (Ben Carolan) and tells him, “We need to start a band.” Under the tutelage of his stoner older brother (Jack Reynor) and his record collection, he starts to think up a sound. With this fresh sense of mission he’s able to meet new friends, including a sheepish musician (Mark McKenna) who becomes his songwriting partner, a keyboardist (Percy Chamburuka), a bassist (Conor Hamilton), and a drummer (Karl Rice). Just like that, they’re a band.

There’s some wistful irony to a period piece in which the a character asserts his New Wave pop punk band will be about the future, not the nostalgia acts of other schools’ cover bands. Some of the film’s appeal sits squarely in nostalgia, looking lovingly on fashion, hair, and sounds of 80’s Ireland. It follows the naïve and earnest group cobbling together an evolving look – pastel suits, hair dye, Halloween costumes, and glam-rock makeup – then lugging equipment around to practice and perform for their own enjoyment. They have a cassette recorder around to play back their outfits’ songs, a heavy camcorder for taping their dancing and mugging for creative super-low-budget music videos. There is terrific creative energy in seeing the music come together, first shyly and fumblingly, then with what can only be described as total teenage confidence. The original songs, by Carney and a variety of collaborators (including Once’s Glen Hansard), are all quite good, some of which could be honest-to-goodness hits on the radio today.

Every number – catchy hummable toe-tappers all – conveniently flows directly out of the lead’s feelings throughout the narrative. This gives movie and music a shared spine that keeps focus narrowly on Cosmo’s concerns. It’s never as much an ensemble delight as its band-centric story approaches from time to time – the other kids are fun to hang around, but they’re not developed much beyond their surface features – but the charming boy-grows-up character piece has its sweetness. There’s an easy, straightforward romanticism on display in an adorably chaste presentation of its puppy love crush, and in the giddy rush creativity brings to its characters’ steps. (It shares with We Are the Best! and That Thing You Do! the cheery spirit of youthful musicianship. No exclamation needed.) Carney shapes the film to state its themes and emotions plainly, with the direct clarity of an easy YA novel.

It gets its effect through such unfussy and direct emotional appeals, feinting in direction of more serious ideas before caving in with syrupy pop resolutions – look at the bully’s fate, for example – albeit with room for sadness and disappointment to linger. One of its best sequences is a rehearsal that expands into Cosmo’s fantasy, an elaborate dance number that becomes a dream of happy endings that’ll never happen. No matter how much the music may lift his spirits and make him friends, some problems – familial, financial, and so on – won’t change. It keeps some perspective. Music’s ability to unite has its limits, but using the artistic impulses which draw these kids together, as a means of defining their identities by trying on new ones, is a bighearted approach to likable cliché. It works because it’s presented so sincerely and simply, aware of its characters and their worlds’ specificity, without pushing the story to miserabilism one the one side or false hope on the other. It stakes out comfortable and endearing feel-good middle ground.

One Hit Wonder: BEGIN AGAIN

Late in Begin Again, a songwriter talks to her rock star ex-boyfriend and boils down the trouble with their failed relationship to a matter of production on a track off of his debut album. She disappointedly tells him that he’s turned what she wrote as a simple ballad into an overproduced piece of arena rock. Her song, she says, has been “buried in the mix.” She may as well be talking about the movie, which has at its core a small, sweet nugget of an idea and proceeds to thoroughly bury it under treacly artifice. It’s a movie about creative inspiration, about how the act of creating music helps its creators work through issues in their personal lives and find friendships and purpose through producing something beautiful to share with the world. Too bad, then, that a movie about the magic of creativity shows so little imagination.

To make matters worse, writer-director John Carney made a movie that did all of the above, that cut straight to the heart of the matter and moved people with its beautiful simplicity and great music. It was 2007’s Once, a Dublin street singer Brief Encounter, a lovely little bittersweet romantic musical. Its leads, musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, poured their hearts out into open performances that ache with pain and transcendence as their musically inclined characters form meaningful connections through song. They won a well-deserved Best Original Song Oscar for their efforts. It’s a movie that made a virtue out of its limited resources by creating deeply felt characters living simple lives made better by letting them become the fuel for their artistic endeavors.

Now here’s Carney’s Begin Again, which plays similar notes, but ends up with little worth listening to. There’s a shyly talented young singer/songwriter (Keira Knightley) who reluctantly performs a song in a New York dive bar at which her friend (James Corden) is playing a gig. An alcoholic record producer (Mark Ruffalo) freshly fired from his indie label hears her. He approaches her and demands to help her record an album. She eventually gives in. Since his former colleague (Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def) won’t bankroll the project, the two of them set out to recruit some session musicians willing to work for nothing and then find authenticity by recording her songs on the street – and in an alley, on top of a skyscraper, in the subway, and all manner of “real” New York locales. It’s a straightforward idea. The montages of the band coming together have a pleasant charge and the leads are charming. But the movie lets them down.

This simple concept is loaded up with emotional baggage straight out of the Hollywood melodrama bargain bin. Ruffalo has an ex-wife (Catherine Keener) who he still loves, and a distant teenage daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) who wears clingy shirts and tight short shorts because (as actually stated out loud in a movie in 2014) she needs a father figure more present and encouraging in her life. Knightley has that rocker ex (Adam Levine of Maroon 5) and a flashback charting their relationship. We also meet several flat, largely superfluous, side characters including a successful musician of some sort who is played by Cee Lo Green. You’d think he’d have a song or two, but no. He’s here for a scene and a half of exposition and that’s it. (I guess the movie can claim it has half of the judges from NBC’s singing competition The Voice.) There’s no sense that any of these characters have weight. They talk about their backstories and their feelings, but they don’t wear them. The cast is made up of fine actors (and Adam Levine). To the extent that it works at all – and it does, for a minute or two here and there – it’s because of them, but they can’t sell such thin material all on their own.

It’s shot with an earnest, up-tempo glossiness, and it’s watchably amiable. But the movie is simply unconvincing. There’s a scene in which two people listen to a song on headphones in the middle of a crowded nightclub. How could they possibly hear it? Later, a woman reads the back of a CD’s case while listening to the music on an iPod. Two industry professionals call Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra “guilty pleasures.” The dramatic resolution of the making-an-album plotline plays out as a credit cookie and is a self-flattering ode to the magical hit-making power of the Internet. These small, bungled details pile up and distract. But at least being so phony helps throw its sappy triteness into stark relief. The more it insists on the creative powers of its characters, the less awareness it shows. It’s a reductive sort of movie that claims to be about inspiration while having none of it.

At one point, a character tells Ruffalo, “this isn’t Jerry Maguire,” which only goes to remind the audience how skilled Cameron Crowe is at blending music and drama into something transcendent, a skill Carney had with Once but is lacking here. Still, the songs, written by Carney and collaborators, are mostly nice and inoffensive to the ear. The ensemble has chops (or fakes them well enough) and the songs are at worst the kind of pleasant guitar-and-piano fare you’d hear as background noise in a Starbucks. The least of the lyrics are overly stretching in a moody middle-schooler sort of way. A low-light: “Yesterday I saw a lion kiss a deer / Turn the page and maybe we’ll find a brand new ending / When we’re dancing in our tears.” Yeezus, that’s bad. At least the melodies and arrangements go down easy, and Knightley’s enough of a charmer to disguise those words on first listen. In such a flimsy dramedy, the songs are never more than welcome distraction to the grinding gears of plot mechanics. They’re just more missed opportunities in a film that proves lightning rarely strikes twice.