More mild than wild
Wild Rose looks more like the blueprint to a future West End jukebox musical than a film interested in exploring the very real problems of its protagonist, while Jonah Hill meticulously re-creates the 1990s in his coming-of-age drama Mid90s
It’s too bad that Wild Rose star Jessie Buckley has been saddled with such a duff script and leaden direction in this country musicthemed tale of a Glaswegian ex-con mother-of-two determined to make it big in Nashville. The Irish actress and former musical theatre star has the pipes and dramatic range to hint at what this film could have been were it not content to function as a rough blueprint for some future West End musical – the sort of jukebox crowd pleaser that panders to the lowest-common denominator with trite talent-showready homilies about following your dreams and thinly sketched supporting characters who have no interior lives of their own. Writer Nicole Taylor and director Tom Harper may weave in allusions to The
Wizard of Oz, structuring the film as a journey in which Buckley’s character, Rose-lynn Harlan, gradually learns there really is no place like home as she moves through life like a tornado, leaving a trail of emotional devastation in her wake. Sadly, they also seem to think that’s a clever enough conceit to negate the need to
back up their protagonist’s very real problems with story details that are remotely plausible.
True, it’s a bold choice to set Roselynn up as a brazen bampot who cares more about pursuing her musical dreams than trying to reconnect with the kids she knows she had too young – but not when the film stacks the decks in her favour by having her encounter nothing but contemptuously conceived middleclass caricatures and face obstacles that are either too easily overcome or simply forgotten about. Early on, for instance, she lands a fairy godmother in the form of Sophie Okonedo’s Susannah, the naive, vaguely defined, well-off wife of Jamie Sives’s workingclass-glaswegian-made-good (the film can’t resist making him the villain of the piece, even though his suspicions about Rose-lynn are on the money and it seems entirely reasonable that he wouldn’t want a lying jailbird who drinks too much hanging around his kids all day).
Susannah, though, takes Roselynn on as something of a goodwill project: hiring her as her wellpaid “daily woman”, throwing Kickstarter benefits to raise money to send her to Nashville and, in one of the film’s many cringeworthy moments, hooking her up with Radio 2’s Whispering Bob Harris, who invites her down to London
to watch a session being recorded for his country music show and give her the Star is Born speech about finding your voice and using it to say something meaningful. No disrespect to Mr Harris’s vast musical knowledge and broadcasting talents, but he’s no Bradley Cooper and the film adds to the general air of corniness by having her arrive in London having lost all her money and belongings only for this to have no bearing on her ability to zip back to Glasgow without a hitch.
The film, which co-stars Julie Walters as Rose-lynn’s long-suffering mother, is full of this kind of that’lldo plotting – place-holder story beats designed to tie together the film’s supposed show-stoppers. And yet, one expectation-subverting moment in the final act notwithstanding,
Wild Rose doesn’t even do the music all that well. An intriguing early flourish of magic realism that has musicians appearing out of nowhere while Rose-lynn sings away doing the Hoovering is quickly abandoned and there’s no exploration of the chemistry a singer with her raw, but tough-to-manage, talent might have with her band, which seems like another missed opportunity given said band are made up of some of the best musicians in Scotland (including Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain).
Early on, Rose-lynn reveals that she loves country music because it’s “three chords and the truth”, which is an elegant, trailer-friendly way of summing up how something simple can be riven with complexity. But there’s a difference between simple and simplistic. Wild Rose is an example of the latter.
A coming-of-age tale about a 13-year-old from a dysfunctional family who finds an identity through skateboarding, 21 Jump Streetstar Jonah Hill’s directorial debut,
Mid90s, is nothing if not studious in
The wayward-teens-skateboarding milieu is a wholesale lift from Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s Kids
its evocation of its eponymous period setting. As distractingly fetishistic about the 1990s as Stranger Things is about the 1980s, the La-set film lingers over meticulously curated pop-culture ephemera, grooves to meticulously curated soundtrack cuts and replicates the cinematic aesthetics of the era by using 16mm film stock and Hi8 video with fisheye lenses to respectively capture the grainy look of the indie movies coming through Sundance and the rough-and-ready skate videos Spike Jonze was pioneering. Even its wayward-teens-skateboarding milieu is a wholesale lift from Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s 1995 controversy magnet Kids. The big question is whether this is all servicing the story or Hill’s determination to announce himself as a credible artist in the way that Ryan Gosling attempted with his David Lynch-pilfering directorial debut Lost River. In truth, it’s a little of both. The journey of its protagonist (Sunny Suljic) is a familiar one, but the skateboarding scenes are majestic and Hill is good at burying melodramatic plot turns with inventive visual flourishes and elliptical scripting. Nevertheless, there’s an affected authenticity to its presentation of marginalised teens that suggests Hill is better at approximating edgy depictions of that world than truthfully representing those who live in it – a fact exposed when viewed in the light of the recent Minding the Gap and Skate Kitchen