Rush Concert

August Rush is a film about music—the beauty of it, the mystery of it, its unique power to connect human beings across large distances. Its main character is Evan, a young boy (Freddie Highmore from Finding Neverland) with amazing, instinctive musical talents—he learns to play the guitar in a couple of hours, and figures out the piano as well as the whole system of musical notation in the space of an idle afternoon. His parents, neither of whom are aware he even exists, are musicians too: his mom Lyla (Keri Russell) is a classical cellist, while his dad Louis (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) sings and plays guitar with a rock band. When Evan runs away from the orphanage where he was raised and escapes to New York, he’s cared for by a succession of fellow music-lovers: a Fagin-like street performer named Wizard (Robin Williams) with a team of child musicians in his “employ”; the director of a gospel choir at a neighbourhood church; even the faculty of Juilliard, where Evan eventually becomes a student.

The problem with August Rush—much more than its unapologetically sentimental, melodramatic plot—is that the music in it isn’t very good. Director Kirsten Sheridan tries to do some interesting things with the score: before Lyla and Louis even meet, for instance, she tries to suggest that they’re right for each other by cross-cutting between the two of them giving two very different concerts, Lyla’s cello harmonizing unexpectedly well with Louis’ rock music. It could have been a thrilling sequence, if the song Louis is singing weren’t such an undistinguished piece of sludgy Irish pub rock. Add Lyla’s cello, and you don’t get magic: you get something that sounds like filler from a Corrs album.

The score lets Sheridan down again in the final scene, where little August conducts the New York Philharmonic as they play his own composition to a huge crowd in Central Park. You can see what Sheridan wants the music to express—a recapitulation of all of August’s adventures in New York, complete with traffic sounds, subways, street guitar, gospel choir. But what composer Mark Mancina (best-known for scoring Disney’s Tarzan) gives us sounds like a generic swelling of Hollywood strings that doesn’t sound like anything August would have come up with.

Freddie Highmore is a good, unaffected little actor, and he successfully mimes his guitar-playing scenes, but his character is so sweet, so pure-hearted, so unshakable in his beliefs (which turn out to be so precisely justified), that it’s hard to respond to him as anything other than a fictional construct. (And didn’t this kid have any exposure to music in that orphanage? When he arrives in New York, he behaves as if it’s the first time he’s even seen a musical instrument.)

Actually, the acting is fine all around—even Robin Williams is pretty good, at least until the final third of the film, when his character turns into a cheap plot device. And I respect the way Sheridan doesn’t shy away from big emotions—she co-wrote In America, a more successful tearjerker about families getting buffeted about by New York City. August Rush has all the right elements, but they don’t come together. Is it in the wrong key? Are the chords too dissonant? If I were a musical prodigy like August, I might be able to choose the right metaphor: all I know is, it just doesn’t sing.