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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        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW
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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