Family Entertainment
DVD Corner: August Rush
Rebekah Hendershot |
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 August Rush would be a film to fill the heart and revive the soul, a seminal work in its field, studied by scholars and aficionados for the secrets of its art…if only its characters would shut the heck up.
Although nominally a film about music, August Rush may be the talkiest film of its genre, and unjustifiably so. Its abominably clichéd dialogue--groaners like “I believe in music the way that some people believe in fairytales”--overwhelms the charm of its premise and the beauty of its execution.
Freddie Highmore of Finding Neverland plays Evan Taylor, a dreamy space cadet of a boy living in a Dickensian orphanage in upstate New York. Evan has an almost autistic fascination with sound of every kind, feeling that he hears music everywhere and that it will somehow lead him to his long-lost parents. The origin of this idea is never explained, nor is it ever explained why the other orphans are so hostile to, and adults so charmed by, an utterly serious boy who will run outside to conduct a symphony played by the wind blowing through tall grass.
Somehow inspired by a routine encounter with a social worker (Terrence Howard), Evan runs away to “follow the music” and ends up in New York City, where he can conduct Manhattan street noises to his heart’s content. The story shifts between past and present, also showing the brief relationship of his parents (Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a concert cellist and an Irish rocker, who had a one-night stand before being separated by her tyrannical stage father, the same man who condemned Evan to the foster-care system and told his daughter the baby had died.
 In New York, Evan falls in with a Faginish character named the Wizard (Robin Williams, neither funny nor touching), who sends street children out with musical instruments to make money as buskers. After encounters with gospel music, religion and the Juilliard School, Evan--now renamed August Rush--gets his big chance to conduct his rhapsody in concert in Central Park for his parents to hear.
August Rush is at its best when its characters are silent or singing: when the head-over-heels father sings “Moondance” on a rooftop, when the lovers converse through cello and bass guitar, when Evan walks down a street and hears music in subway engines and police sirens or when father and son meet and play dueling acoustics. Then it’s the kind of film to make children run home and beg their parents for music lessons. The movie’s music was nominated for an Academy Award and justly so--composer Mark Mancina reportedly worked for a year-and-a-half on the score, and it shows.
Unfortunately, no one worked nearly that long or hard on the script. Characters’ motivations range from the flimsy to the outright impossible; the central players of the drama are only thinly sketched, leaving the cast with nothing to do but say the lines and gut it out; the central moments of the story are reduced to clichés. When Evan’s father quits his rock band because he can’t forget the woman he lost, the scene is as taut as a guitar string until Rhys Meyers yells, “I’m suffocatin’ here!” and the piece snaps and is ruined. Perhaps one of his earlier lines sums up the problem most eloquently; as a child, he says, he used to talk to the moon in the night sky and hear it answer, but “Now I just find myself on a roof, talking to myself like a loon.”
 The DVD release (Warner Home Video, MSRP: $28.98) features a double-sided disc with the full-screen version of the film on one side and the widescreen version on the other--either because the producers realized they would have a hard time selling many discs if consumers had to choose, or perhaps to increase the odds that fumble-fingered viewers will quickly destroy both sides and obliterate their shame. There are few truly special features--dialogue in two additional languages (French and Spanish), the theatrical trailer and a measly collection of deleted scenes that add nothing to the story. The scenes feature even more ghastly dialogue than the film proper, with clunkers like, “I’ve always known where I come from, and now I know where I’m going” and the pitiful insult, “You’re such a dreamer.” The disc is also available on Blu-Ray, and an HD-DVD release is scheduled for April 1, with both the standard and HD versions available in spite of the recent HD-DVD deflation. There are no additional features listed on either high-definition disc.
August Rush ultimately rises and falls on the basis of the music that animates it, and viewers with enough of a music yen will probably enjoy renting it once. But for everyone else, the rhapsody grinds to a halt as soon as an actor opens his or her mouth, making this film one to leave on the shelf.
August Rush is now available on DVD.
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