OVP: August Rush (2007)

Film: August Rush (2007)
Stars: Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard
Director: Kirsten Sheridan
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Raise It Up")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Sometimes the Oscar Viewing Project has been a rapturous delight.  Films like What Price Hollywood? and Before Sunset have become favorites of mine, delights that I wouldn't have uncovered were it not for the project and for that I shall continue to trudge ahead, even if occasionally the Oscars decide to throw a cruelly sour and saccharine bone my way.  That's the way I felt with August Rush, a film that got a fifth slot Best Original Song nomination a few years back and was during that brief period of time that Freddie Highmore was a movie star (kudos to him for skipping the drugs-phase of his child actor career and heading over to the Bates Motel).  The movie is the sort that at best looks like a Disney feel-good in the commercials, and at worst it could turn into an out-and-out tragedy of film-watching.

(Spoilers Ahead) Terrible.  This movie was terrible.  I don't even know how to sugarcoat it, because there's really no sugarcoating such a travesty of cloying and false morality and idiotic characterizations. I honestly don't even know where to begin except to tell you I took a nap about halfway through and had to restart the movie because it was so bad.  The film follows Evan/August (Highmore), a savant-style child with an uncanny ability for music, who is searching for his parents Lila (Russell) and Louis (Rhys Meyers), who had a one-night stand for his conception but somehow fell in love and were torn apart because he was a common Irish guitarist and she was a Daddy's Princess Juilliard student who had never lived a day in her life.  August runs away from his parents and is taken in by a man named Wizard (Williams), a Fagin-style figure who coordinates child street performers around the city to play music.

The plot already sounds like a series of cliches, doesn't it?  It's not just that the writing is bad, it's that it takes literally every moment that you know is coming and makes it as heavy-handed as humanly possible.  There is a scene where Terence Howard (who plays a social worker of some sort looking for August when he runs away) asks Lila why she wants her son now.  The correct answer is she didn't know he existed until very recently since her father had told her that her son was dead, but she answers "I've always been looking for him."  It's one of those moments where you just feel the vomit rising up to your eyeballs-was this movie written by Kirk Cameron or something?  The film gets unnecessarily religious about halfway through which steals away from the central theme of music bringing people together and instead wants to throw God in the mix as well (I'm all for religion and will be attending church in about fourteen hours, so don't give me that look, but there's a time and a place artistically and this was not it).  However, at that point in the film we've stumbled into so many cliches it's easy to see that coming up in the rearview.

Seriously, it's hard to put into words how much I struggled with this film.  I think part of the problem was August himself.  Highmore's maturity for an eleven-year-old is too advanced for him to be so naive as to consistently see that Wizard is using him or for the film to feel so completely based in an era pre-internet or pre-cell phone.  August is smart enough to be able to compose sonnets at a moment's will and count days in his head, but he isn't smart enough to realize that Wizard's blackmailing him is manipulative and not true?  It's one of those convenient plot points in films, because it is trying to have its cake and eat it too, but I think that's the worst kind of writing and it irks me to no end.  It doesn't help that Highmore's performance is not good (I will admit that I never got him as a child actor-he was always too vanilla and too charisma-challenged as a child performer), and that he reads every line as if he's talking to the camera and not to the person sitting in front of him.  None of the actors are particularly good, though.  Keri Russell is heavy-handed and her part is so severely-underwritten that we have absolutely no clue as to her opinion of music, her father, or her life, or why she continues to live such a vapid existence.  Robin Williams is a brilliant performer, but he doesn't know how to tone down Wizard's Snidely Whiplash-style villainy, and as a result we get yet another late-career miss from him.  Arguably the only person halfway watchable in the crew is Rhys Meyers', who at the very least precludes himself mostly from the sugar-soaked dialogue and while his character is also truly underwritten, he at least finds some charm in it.

Overall this is one of the worst movies I have seen in recent memory.  Even the Oscar nomination seems wholly undeserved, as the song that was nominated has little resonance to the plot and is barely even sung in the film (and sounds so generic it's hard to imagine how anyone noticed it was an original).  A true disappointment, especially in a year like 2007 where pretty much the whole catalog of Oscar nominees were doing marvelous things.  The Academy would have been better off picking another song from Once.  And then I could have had my afternoon back.