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Friday, January 7, 2011
MOVIE REVIEW
Country Strong
Get Her On The Road On Time!
Gwyneth Paltrow as Kelly Canter in Shana Feste's music drama "Country Strong".
Screen Gems
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Friday,
January 7, 2011
"I'm going to go and get the papers, get the papers."
That's a line from "GoodFellas" (1990), a film I've been quoting a lot lately
for some reason, and it describes Shana Feste's music melodrama "Country
Strong", and its relentless need to repeat itself. The film opened across
the U.S. and Canada today.
"Country Strong" -- featuring a well-worn string of clichés -- tells the story
of Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow), an alcoholic country music singer-superstar
looking to get back on the road after tragedy befalls her. Kelly's
relationship with husband and promoter James (Tim McGraw) is tenuous, her
insecurities transparent and battle with the bottle arduous. To bolster
his wife's return to the stage, James pushes the eager and younger
Clairol-enhanced Chiles (Leighton Meester) as an opening act, and before long
Beau (Garrett Hedlund) also makes sweet music for adoring fans. Both are
inserted as cute puppy-dog type characters. Repeated shots capture Mr.
Hedlund's watery-eyed smile. Ladies: you are supposed to drool.
Nothing surprises us in Ms. Feste's film except perhaps the charisma
Oscar-winner Ms. Paltrow brings to Kelly. She's admirable here, yet
appears to be showing you that she can act like a drunken, licentious singing
superstar rather than become one on the big screen. The
performance is overdone, and it's the kind of role played before, and better, by
Sissy Spacek in "Coal Miner's Daughter". Other films featuring
self-destructive musicians ("The Rose", "Crazy Heart" among them) are more
potent than this lightweight fare. I found myself thinking of "Crazy
Heart" a lot while watching "Country Strong", and of a song Jeff Bridges sings
in the Oscar-winning film.
Being perpetually distracted by other films while watching the one in front of
you isn't necessarily a good sign. The filmmakers of "Country Strong"
appear to intuit this, since Ms. Feste and company work overtime to ensure that
they have your attention by repeating or emphasizing lines of dialogue with
equivalent images. One example is the song "Give In To Me". It is
sung during a concert, then reprised over images of two people engaging in
foreplay. Many redundancies litter this film, which has brief bouts of
warmth and charm, often during its weakest dialogue. "Country Strong"
however, is far too obvious for its own good. The film telegraphs its meek
punches. The cinematic boxing scorecard says: no match for Ali's
rope-a-dope!
The redundancy of "Country Strong" is met with three helplessly goose-bump
moments on stage. Though you know these scenes are arriving, you succumb,
even in a film as poorly executed as this one. While the film's music is
good enough to satisfy fans and non-fans of country music alike, the placement
of characters, their abrupt turns and muddled ambitions is sloppy. The
repetition may in hindsight be due to laziness and not the desperate need to
convince audiences: "did you get what we meant by this?" In "Country
Strong", cardboard cut-outs prevail. The truth or motivations of its
characters aren't sufficiently explored, and their depth goes only as far as the
expedient need to get from the first act to the last. The shallowness and
dishonesty of the film and its ploys are its most regrettable facets.
Mr. McGraw, a country legend in his own right, doesn't sing here, but his James
(just as Mr. McGraw's character was in
"The Blind Side") is more or less the put-upon
husband shepherding his wife through stormy seas. The bulk of his time is
spent rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. He smiles a few
times, too. Mr. McGraw has potential as an actor but is severely stifled
by Ms. Feste's messy, cliché-heavy screenplay, designed to achieve weight by
throwing a character under a metaphorical bus to gain audience sympathy.
Ms. Feste will do better next time. (So will the film's producers, which
include actor Tobey Maguire. "Spider-Man", you can hear someone say, 'turn
out the lights on this movie!'")
"Country Strong" has enough of its near-two-hour running time to parody its
genre's shortcomings, and Ms. Feste's camera floats with occasional unbroken
shots, craning from the sky to start the film. The director tries to break
her movie out of its own artificial box but it remains trapped by its lack of
scope and character investment. The characters are caricatured, so the
elongated drama that's meant to be sincere isn't taken seriously at all.
With: Marshall Chapman, Lari White, Jeremy Childs, Jackie Welch, J.D. Parker,
Cinda McCain.
"Country Strong" is rated PG-13 by the Motion
Picture Association Of America for thematic elements involving alcohol abuse and
some sexual content.
The film's running time is one hour and 51 minutes.
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