Four stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.4.14
It’s a bit rough around the edges
at first, the approach uncertain, the artist perhaps nervous and worried about
looking foolish.
A needless concern.
 |
| With Dan (Mark Ruffalo, far right) acting as an on-the-fly director, Greta (Keira Knightley) performs one of her songs in a New York City alley, accompanied by several talented instrumentalists, and watched by a gaggle of neighborhood children. |
I could be discussing the first
song we see performed by Greta (Keira Knightley), reluctantly and a bit shyly,
in front of an indifferent bar crowd. But I’m actually talking about this film
itself: Perhaps writer/director John Carney is that clever, to have mirrored
Greta’s stumbling debut before the public eye, with our reaction to the manner
in which her story unfolds.
Because, in both cases, the
talent involved can’t help but win us over.
Begin Again is the newest
offering from the Irish filmmaker who charmed us so thoroughly with the saga of
a Dublin busker in 2006’s Once, a film cherished just as much for its music —
and that marvelous, Academy Award-winning song, “Falling Slowly” — as for the gently romantic manner in
which its story unfolded.
Carney’s new film once again
revolves around music, but the setting and tone are both different and somewhat
grittier. This narrative has a villain, but it’s an entity rather than an
individual: the music industry, depicted as the instrument by which pure
expression is quashed, either benignly or overtly. Remaining true to one’s
dreams, passions and (reasonable) expectations is the ideal here: a goal too
easily corrupted, as we shall see, by outside forces conscious only of the
bottom line.
Those who adore New York for its
cornucopia of emotions and experiences will delight in Carney’s rapturous
depiction: a Big Apple we’ve not seen idolized so passionately since Woody
Allen’s Manhattan, back in 1979. This is a New York of joyous romance, much
like the Paris of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie: the city as we imagine it,
based on cinematic valentines like this one.
The story opens in the
aforementioned East Village bar, as the unwilling Greta is dragged to the stage
for one song: a brief musical interlude noticed by nobody except Dan (Mark
Ruffalo), whose presence — in that bar, at that moment — is explained during
the first of Carney’s clever flashbacks. Dan, once a lauded record label exec,
has fallen on hard times prompted by a crisis in his personal life; the result
is growing friction with his longtime partner, Saul (Mos Def), which climaxes
in yet another humiliation.
Dan also drinks too much, and has
been doing so for too long. But his radar remains unimpaired: He’s drawn, moth
to flame, by this hesitant performance by a British singer/songwriter who’d
rather be anywhere else.
