|
| • Advanced Search • Help |
Songcatcher | Year: 2000 Classification: Drama Directed: - Maggie Greenwald Actors/Actresses: - Janet McTeer - Mike Harding (II) A Must for the Study of Southern Culture. To preserve Southern culture is to preserve a culture with strong roots for many Americans. Just as this film depicts an attempt to preserve old English ballads that have survived nearly intact because of the isolation of the mountain people, the film itself is important because it, itself, is an attempt at cultural preservation. The mountain setting of the film is extraordinarily rich, the characters are thankfully more real than stereotypical, and the story is rich and fullfilling. Pat Carroll's performance is exceptional. One of the major plusses of this movie is the way the set design and cinematography contributes to the story. In one key scene shot inside a cabin, the crude conditions are clearly shown by the daylight winking through the walls. The plight of the characters' living conditions is certainly obvious in the story, but that cabin told the rest of the story. In another scene, several people are dancing outdoors and the camera is positioned so that the viewer seems to be standing in the crowd. The scene develops as all but two of the characters dance and the movement of the camera around the dancers to a high angle shot from the trees stretches and isolates the scene so that the dancers are shown to be some distance from the two non-dancers. This shot establishes not so much a rift between the characters, but a separation. This film is very similar to Donald Davidson's novel, The Big Ballad Jamboree (University Press of Mississippi), and I strongly recommend both the movie and the book to everyone wanting to enjoy the richness of true "hillbilly" life and music. Great talent, good intentions, but... Watching "Songcatcher" reminded me of attending an illustrated lecture by a brilliant, compassionate but insufferable academic whose scholarly specialty is the music and history of Appalachia. Maggie Greenwald certainly gives us beautiful, striking pictures of the North Carolina hills; she brings on the best available actors--Janet McTeer, Aidan Quinn, Pat Carroll--to enact her tale; she hires the best available singers--Hazel Dickens, Iris DeMent, Emmy Rossum--to sing beautiful Appalachian ballads in authentic style. But instead of giving us a story that builds to a dramatically satisfying climax, Greenwald gives us a series of sermons about the exploitation of the hill folk, the despoiling of their land, the oppression of women. You agree with everything she says--you wouldn't have come to the show otherwise--but she preaches to the choir as if it had the collective brains of a field of kudzu. "Songcatcher" makes all the obvious points, and ends up in a fairly ridiculous tangle of melodramatic plot ends. But the talented people who collaborated on it ensure that it can't simply be dismissed. The movie is a series of set pieces, some of which are as beautiful as you might hope, and some unfortunately are not. Music to your ears. Set in 1907 a struggling musicologist fights against male dominated academia but ultimately finds gold in the the Appalachian mountains when she visits her sister and gets caught up in the spell binding whirlwind of mountain music. Iris Dement has a short cameo as well as Taj Mahal which affords the discerning listener earthy cries and a true-bluesy guitar not lost in electronic jungle of equalizers and amplifiers. The music will dwell in your chest for long after you hear it and for some it will be a sweet reminder of a distant home. This movie won a Sundance award for ensemble cast but unfortunately due to one of the side elements of the story it did not come to the greatness that O Brother, Where Art Thou? did. The best moment was found in the duality that life always reeks of: The pseudoprude Penleric informs her younger sister that her less-than-perfect ways are a detriment to the new found school--to say nothing of the Penleric's rompus room cover up she left back at the university amidst all those impressionable young minds. Oh, death . . . Buy Songcatcher at Amazon.com Buy posters at Allposters.com Jamster - the latest ringtones for your phone!  Search with Walhello on the Internet on Songcatcher Search with the Priority Search Engine on Songcatcher This page in other languages: Suomeksi | Nederlands | Deutsch
|
