Not hip, uncool and a bit off-key
But film does have its share of some decent moments
Though it goes to great lengths to disguise itself as art-house hip, Begin Again is a corn dog covered in cheese.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, especially at a time of year when the taste buds yearn for sugar and grease to ease to our sweaty existence and escapist cartoon fantasies as we colonize the multiplex.
Director John Carney has committed no cinematic crime in delivering a sticky, frequently cloying and entirely inauthentic romance. Indeed, it is from sugar cubes such as this that Hollywood’s crystal castle is made.
What’s irritating about Begin Again — besides the everscratchy Keira Knightley — is the pose. Carney is desperate to appear youthful and cool in his bid to attract a millennial audience, so he cast pop star and Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine as — it’s a stretch — a successful singersongwriter named Dave.
Dave and Greta (Knightley) are a couple on the rise, thanks to Dave’s new recording deal that landed them in a spacious Manhattan loft.
They represent the next generation of talent, but underneath their low-profile radials lies the body of the idealistic Generation Xer, the dreamer with a vodka bottle and a prescription for Xanax: Dan (Mark Ruffalo).
Dan used to be one of the top independent label executives in the world, breaking talent and cruising into radio programmers’ offices on a chariot of heavy rotation and music geek credibility.
But times have changed since the glory days of Sub Pop, and Dan is quickly becoming a museum piece, much like his old Jaguar and his penchant for guitarbased ballads.
Realizing he’s about to be shelved for posterity, Dan is committed to pickling himself alive, drink by delicious drink. It’s during one of his can-and-preserve sessions that he happens to hear Greta play a song.
You guessed it: It’s an open mike night and Greta’s got a great little number that blows Dan off his bar stool. Suddenly, Dan hears the feeble voice and strumming with a complete ensemble, as though his head were a mixing board.
We get it. But Carney thinks he has to play it out for us visually, and creates a laughable computer-generated sequence that shows instruments playing them- selves. The cello picks up a bow, the drums pick up their sticks, the bass plucks its own strings.
Everything in this movie feels unmistakably forced, especially Knightley. The pixie-faced actor who owns the “smoky eye” look does her best to resuscitate her Bend it Like Beckham sweetness, but her edges are just too sharp to fit into the boho earth mother role with conviction.
We have no worthy source of empathy. Ruffalo’s character never undergoes the transformation we expect, Knightley remains aloof and unemotional, and the movie just gets worse.
Carney made Once, the movie about the busker couple that audiences lapped up like melted ice cream, and he’s clearly making the same movie one more time.
At times, the scenes are so canned they feel like soap opera. But the movie does have its fair share of decent moments thanks to Ruffalo and co-star Catherine Keener — who know how to play a downbeat without announcing it to the audience.
The other surprise is Levine, who single-handedly brings credibility to the musical side of the story and redeems the larger theme of truth in art — even when the rest of the movie seems to be lying through its protruding canines.