Songs for dreamers in “Wild Rose”
About one hour into “Wild Rose”, our heroine Rose Lynn gets up on stage to sing a cover of Emmylou Harris’ ‘Born to Run’. It’s a pivotal moment in her fight for stardom as she prepares for an amateur gig to showcase her country-singing talents. She quickly finds her groove, belting out Harris’ song for the itinerant in all of us. Just as the song is building up to the first chorus, which begins “Oh, I was born to run. To get ahead the rest. And all I wanted was to be the best,” we cut from her performance into a montage, which begins with a tired and beleaguered Rose Lynn clearing the table and watching her children play.
It’s a jarring cut, so at odds with the theme of the lyric. But that jarring cut is the centre of what “Wild Rose” is trying to say. That domestic scene cuts to a recurring moment in the montage that covers the song. As Rose continues to hone her singing, we watch her dropping her two young children off at various babysitters as she divides her time between maternal responsibilities and personal fulfilment. It’s the central dramatic crux of the film but director Tom Harper is deploying the montage here with such specificity and detail, it makes the Rose’s conflict even more difficult to watch. It’s the exact case of dissonance – the louder and more passionately Rose sings about her quest for freedom, the more the camera traps her tightly in the frame, her features diluted in a snapback pulled down. She’s singing the song but she’s not living it. She’s trapped between two worlds.
The musical drama, a British film set in Glasgow, Scotland, is about Rose Lynn Harlan, a personable but not too responsible young woman recently released from jail for a one-year minor drug charge. She returns home to take up responsibility of her children and also to tend to her dream of making it to Nashville to begin a country music career. Getting to Nashville is a must for her. “Who ever heard of a country singer from Scotland?” She asks the question mulishly early in the film. She’s a small-town-girl with big-city dreams just wanting to get out. It’s a familiar crisis for anyone who’s lived in any small town anywhere in the world and it’s that note of familiarity that’s immediately striking about “Wild Rose”.
The broad strokes of this story are very familiar. Rose is talented but fickle and irresponsible. Her mother is cautious about her dreams and is sceptical of the way she seems more full-throated in her desire for her dreams than in her desire to tend her children. A charming benefactor decides to help Rose achieve those dreams, but things must come to a head when lies are revealed and our star must decide what she wants to do with her life.