SONG ONE
DIRECTOR: Kate Barker-Froyland
CAST: Anne Hathaway, Mary Steenburgen, Johnny Flynn, Ben Rosenfield
CLASSIFICATION: 10 SPS
RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes
RATING: ***
Song One floats onto the screen with all the innocuousness of a guitar-strumming indie singer-songwriter. The movie is pleasant enough, but also incapable of making a lasting impact.
Hathaway returns to the independent film scene, starring as Franny, a doctoral student in anthropology. She’s studying tribes in Morocco when she gets a call that her brother, Henry, is in a coma after being hit by a taxi. Franny’s mother says it’s time to come home.
Franny and her mom, (Steenburgen), have the chafing relationship of many an onscreen mother and daughter, which means that Steenburgen has to say such obvious lines as, “You cut off all your hair. I loved it long.”
Franny, meanwhile, feels powerless at the sight of her brother on a breathing tube in a hospital bed. He might never wake up, the doctor tells her. So she decides that, instead of punching walls or crying, she needs to keep busy. She does so by going through her brother’s diary, reading about the things he loves and recreating those experiences.
That’s how she meets James Forester. James (Flynn) is a softly-spoken indie crooner with loads of fans and no discernible personality. Random girls ask him to sign their iPods, and he has the messy blond hair and shoe-gazing demeanour of a certain kind of star. Henry was (and maybe still will be) an aspiring musician, and James was among the comatose man’s favourites.
Franny finds a ticket stub in Henry’s diary, heads to one of James’s shows and then hangs around afterwards to awkwardly introduce herself. (It turns out, “my brother’s in a coma” isn’t a great icebreaker.) Despite an inauspicious beginning, the musician shows up at the hospital with two teas, offering to sing for Henry.
But about halfway through his ditty, you start to wonder whom James is really serenading.
Flynn is a musician in real life, as well as an actor, and has a lovely voice, but he and Hathaway have zero chemistry. He also delivers his lines with so little emotion, he comes across more as a tool – a way for Franny to cope – than a character.
The movie has the low-key appeal of Once, with its extended scenes of music and drama-free romantic subplot. But the characters are bland, despite their quirks. Franny may buy a gramophone and record random street noise, but the idiosyncrasies feel randomly generated given that she is entirely eccentricity-free when she deals with other people.
And yet, despite its flaws, Song One has sweet and romantic moments. There really are pleasures to be had, and a big part of that might be the music by Jenny Lewis, Jonathan Rice and Nate Walcott. But like the music, which is easy on the ears though never catchy, the movie doesn’t stick with you. Once it’s over, it’s gone. – The Washington Post
If you liked Laggies or The Rewriter, you will like this.