Begin Again

I can’t say that I was taken by writer-director John Carney’s 2006 unlikely hit, Once, but a lot of people were so I’ll concede that that was just me.  But even granting that that film had a real resonance far from justifies Carney remaking it with a bigger, Trans-Atlantic glow. What worked on a small scale looks and feels contrived when the production values get upped to this level. Which is ironic because the repeating refrain of the film is about keeping it real and down home.

Mark Ruffalo plays Dan, a record producer spiraling towards self-destruction. Having just been fired by his former partner he goes into a bar one night and hears Gretta (Keira Knightley), who has just been dumped by her pop-star boyfriend (real life pop star, Adam Levine), singing one of her songs. He immediately recognizes her talent and persuades her to let him record an album. Which they do on the fly at various locations around New York while at the same putting the pieces of their broken lives together.

Whilst there are some enjoyable elements to Carney’s film: Ruffalo’s crumpled loser and his relationship with his estranged wife (Catherine Keener) and 14-year-old daughter (Hailee Steinfeld) in particular, overall it is too cute for its own good, packaged like a late Woody Allen movie or an American Express advertisement to press the familiar feel-good buttons. Gretta with her plaintive indie pop songs is simply too sweetly vulnerable to strike anyone as anything but a soft-headed scriptwriter’s invention. It is no doubt purely coincidental that Knightley looks remarkably like a young Winona Ryder but she lacks that actress's slightly grungy attitude, a quality that this film sorely needed.

As for the recording of Gretta's album (which, of course, is brilliant) forget about it. Only in cinematic fantasyland could songs be recorded en plein air (even in dinghies) and sound remotely like we hear them. Given that the songs were clearly recorded in a professional studio (even the opening number) that pretty much destroys the film’s credibility. And speaking of fantasy, when Gretta and Dan go on a walk around Manhattan each with headphones plugged into a single Ipod we move into squirm-inducing rom-com cliché territory. Mercifully, Carney refrains from the standard Hollywood ending,

Perhaps I was on my own with Once, but I suspect that at least a few will join me in finding Begin Again overly packaged mush. Which is not to say that there won’t be a lot of people who fall for it.

DVD Extras: Making Of Featurette; One song performed by Levine and four by Knightley.

Available from: Village Roadshow

 

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