Director: John Carney
Stars: Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, Adam Levine, James Corden, Hailee Steinfeld, Catherine Keener, Mos Def, Cee-Lo Green
Record exec Dan (Ruffalo) gets fired from his company as after a long and fruitless search for the next big sound. While diving around bars he hears Gretta (Knightley) sing, and knows that it’s the sound he’s been looking for. She’s dealing with the break-up of a long relationship with Dave (Levine), who is now a rockstar, so she agrees with Dan’s plan and with the help of her friend Steve (Corden) and a few other people they make an album that captures the sounds and spirit of New York.
Begin Again was one of my most anticipated films of the year. I absolutely loved Carney’s previous effort, Once, but this has the added bonus of Ruffalo, Knightley and the backdrop of New York. Is it as good as Once? Probably not, in my opinion, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
Ruffalo played a pretty typical character for him but it worked. Knightley was sweet and determined. The rest of the characters weren’t developed that well though, with the exception of Dave. The film suffered a little bit as I felt Dan’s wife Miriam (Keener) could have done with more development. After all, we’re given a scathing indictment of her previous behavior but then it seems we’re supposed to root for her and Dan to get back together. There’s also some sexual tension between Dan and Gretta, but this is abandoned pretty quickly so I wondered whether it was even supposed to be there at all. I guess it was a subtle hint at the different paths life could take.
Where the film shines, as expected, is the music. Every performer is great, although I have noticed some disparaging remarks about Knightley’s performance. I thought she was good and put a suitable amount of emotion into her songs. The recordings around New York was a fun thing to do and all the songs were fully immersive. As well as being good songs they provided emotional anchors as well, two notable moments being the kitchen scene and then the concert scene at the end – two powerful moments that highlight the strength of musicals.
What I did love is how the film played with the usual structure of romantic movies but replaced the romance with artistic integrity. There’s even a last-minute dash to a door, and for a moment I thought the film was going to descend into a cliché but it avoided that. The music is at the heart of this film, and it gets all the attention. But there is a little problem. The message seems to be that the art is the most important thing and you shouldn’t be so concerned with writing a hit, rather writing something that’s true to you, and if you show your passion and the song comes across as authentic it will click with people. That’s all well and good but it’s quite idealistic and probably not realistic. In the movie it’s not handled as delicately as it could have been because Gretta has the help of a record producer, and one of the reasons it sells so well is because she gets re-tweeted by someone Dan introduced her to, a famous hip-hop artist who has hundreds of thousands of followers. Obviously this isn’t going to be a common outlet for the usual struggling artist.
As a result the films feels a little too slick and lacks the same kind of pathos that felt so credible in Once. But despite this I still enjoyed the film a lot. It does have flaws but it gets plenty right and it’s a good follow-up effort to Once, although in my opinion it doesn’t surpass that film.