Now Showing: Music of the Heart

Now Showing

Music of the Heart

by Cole Smithey
The flawed notion that simply because a story is true that it automatically makes a exalted premise for a movie is where horror director Wes Craven (Last House on the Left, Scream) makes the first mistake of many in directing his first divergence from the horror genre. Harlem violin teacher Roberta Guaspari (played by Meryl Streep — Sophie’s Choice) came to widespread public recognition when her New York inner city music teaching program was depicted in the 1996 Academy Award-nominated documentary, "Small Wonders." Miramax head Harvey Weinstein liked the documentary enough to bring in screenwriter Pamela Gray (A Walk On the Moon) to write a draft for Music of the Heart. Gray’s first draft screenplay was prematurely accepted as a shooting script for the movie. When the story jumps ten years later in the film, none of the actors are able to make age the transition believably, and all hopes of a willing suspension of disbelief are lost. The make-up is insufficient and the later year performances by Streep, Angela Bassett, Gloria Estefan, and Aidan Quinn all leave much to be desired.

Inner city events like the death of one of Roberta’s students in a drive-by shooting take their toll in scenes that underhandedly lack severity and weight. Music of the Heart’s child actors are ill-equipped to give Streep enough of a performance for her to have enough juice to act against and leave the actress alone on the screen to carry the scenes’ emotional weight by herself. For the most part, Craven and his production team blindly follow Streep behind the curse of an obviously underwritten script. Despite Streep’s best efforts at handling unwieldy scene shifts as a struggling single mother/violin teacher with a heart of gold, even her highest caliber acting ability is crushed beneath the weight of the poorly told story. However Streep does make formidable use of her freshly-learned violin skills in warm and convincing scenes of her teaching unruly children to play the violin.

Patronizing and pedantic, Craven’s Music of the Heart attempts to be all things to all people and, in so doing, loses dramatic focus. The movie begins with Roberta as an emotional basket-case after the desertion of her husband and shows her moving toward self-sufficiency by way of teaching violin in the culture shock of a Harlem Elementary school. Roberta is shown single-handedly raising two boys and gaining enough self-confidence to get rid of her non-committal boyfriend Brian (Aidan Quinn). She renovates a newly purchased house and works like a fiend at teaching troubled kids to play a very difficult musical instrument. It puts the audience in the role of husband to Roberta but abandons them her inner-life and their interest in favor of emphasizing her teaching career. As the violin program itself becomes the focal point of the story, Roberta’s independence is co-opted in favor of a general miasma of unclear musical success that some 1,400 of Roberta’s students enjoy. Even the importance of the students’ mastery of the violin goes neglected. Whether any of Roberta’s students have gone on to become composers, name-artists, or even giging musicians is never addressed.

As Roberta’s successful musical program is saved by a benefit performance at New York’s famed Carnegie Hall with the musical assistance of master violinists like Issac Stern and Itzhak Perlman, the communal jubilation reeks with pat sentimentality and an imitation of relevance. If drama is the genre that Wes Craven thought he was accessing to substitute for his favored motif of horror, he missed the mark completely. Instead, Music of the Heart is a sadly insulting attempt to tell one amazing woman’s very dramatic story because everyone involved, except for the main actors, forgot that it was her story and not that of a sterile minority-pleasing music program in an elementary school in Harlem.

Dogma
(So bad it gets no rating.)
by Cole Smithey
It’s all too tempting for American film audiences to jump to the defense of movies that come under fire from the Catholic Church (and in this case from Dogma’s own original distribution company — Disney/Miramax) as most probably just misunderstood or misrepresented examples of cinematic parody with a pure intention behind them. Americans are also far more likely these days to call themselves Atheist, Agnostic, or Zen Buddhist. But regardless of any amount of audience faith, or lack thereof, in a higher power or even trust in director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy) to construct an entertaining movie, all bets are off in the reality of Smith’s finished product. Dogma proves itself to be a disgusting, juvenile, intelligence-insulting, youth-pandering, profane assault on any audience willing to endure the film’s two hour-plus length.

Because of the Columbine shootings, 1999 will forever mark American history as a pivotal turning point in public consciousness. Obviously Smith is seeking, with Dogma, to share the limelight of the brilliant Swiftian satire of Trey Parker’s and Matt Stone’s irreverent South Park Bigger Longer & Uncut. But where South Park had inventiveness, style, and spasmodic bursts of comedic genius from which profanity itself was the issue, Dogma flails as a scattershot experiment in capitalist gain by way of fake theological arguments cloaked in scatological ‘comedy.’ Smith attempts to pre-emptively defend himself in the film’s press notes by saying that to insist that anything in the film ‘is incendiary or inflammatory is to miss’ his intention of making audiences laugh and to pass judgment. But when bitch-diva Alanis Morrissette appears in the film’s final scenes as God, Smith’s crass sarcasm reaches an apogee of distaste and insult that is both sickening and gross. As Morrissette, dressed in ridiculous clothing, performs handstands in the church yard after silently yelling at an angel until his body explodes, a presumably twenty-something American audience will be taken for granted to find enjoyable droll humor.

Smith’s ‘comic fantasia’ sets up two rebel fallen angels, Loki (Matt Damon — Rounders) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck — Armageddon), who have discovered a loophole in Catholic doctrine which will allow them to return to heaven if they pass through a blessed arch in a New Jersey cathedral. The angel Meteron (Alan Rickman — Die Hard) appears as the messenger of God to abortion clinic worker, Bethany (Linda Fiorentino — The Last Seduction), and assigns her the task of preventing Loki and Bartleby from entering the arch. For, if the two angels are allowed to cross the archway, they will negate mankind’s existence thereby setting off an apocalypse. Clever and witty as the premise may sound, there is no such sagacity to follow. Instead, Bethany’s journey from Wisconsin to New Jersey becomes a string of vile and poorly executed blood and feces oozing scenes lacking in comedic integrity juxtaposed against Loki’s and Bartleby’s killing spree as they travel on their identical path to New Jersey.

Smith blatantly soils the reputations of a pack of name actors who will come to regret having been associated with the movie. Chris Rock falls flat in his preachy monologues, as the 13th Apostle, about hanging out with the black Jesus Christ. Rock’s line readings are labored and lack spontaneity. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are impossible to separate from their characters. They’re just Matt and Ben doing that thing that they do together in movies. They actually serve to cancel each other out whenever they appear onscreen together. Alan Rickman and Linda Fiorentino lift Smith’s crudely crafted script in the scenes they share. The two veteran actors carry with them so much polish and ingenuity that they appear as small islands of dignity peeking above the black waters of Smith’s script.

Kevin Smith has never made a good movie. Clerks was a mildly entertaining frisk through Generation X culture with very little dramatic principle. Mallrats was a complete disaster. And Chasing Amy was a grating and exploitative movie trading on sexual immaturity. Dogma could prove to be an overdue victory for the Catholic Church. Desecration is like pornography in that you know it when you see it. There are upsetting scenes of desecration in the Exorcist that don’t hold a candle to the nefarious depths that Dogma reaches in impugning faith, sanctity, and all that is holy. The film’s scope is that of a spoiled American child who as had too much cake and ice cream for an unequivocally extended period of time. As the capitalist-pig child happily pukes up his undeserved rewards, surrounded by his well-moneyed, luxury-sequestered celebrity friends the second and third world prays with a faith that silences his burping sounds. American suburbia is a bastion of evil and untruth. Dogma is a fruit of that rotten tree.

Even if Smith had assembled a solid comedic plot without excessive violence, profanity, and idiotic pandering about a ‘female’ God and a ‘black’ Jesus Christ, he would be boxing outside of his weight class on all levels of satire, dialogue, and the ability to portray human dignity and values. Lion’s Gate Film Releasing took over the burden of this problematic movie from Miramax because someone had to release this expensive film to the public. At the same time, a truly humanist film director like Satybaldy Narymbetov of Almaty, Kazakhstan finds U.S. distribution of his most recent film Biography of a Young Accordion Player unattainable. American film distribution is the archway to heaven for some. And that arch is polarized by the leverage of money.