Can't
you just call in sick and skip therapy?
No,
mom, I am sick, that's why I'm in therapy.
The
cinema-goer gets it. Ricki and the Flash is a film-allegory
about the sick state of family life in the USA, and maybe even in the
world, today. Yet the cinema-goer finds nothing to care about. Not
the down-at-heel pub rocker, Ricki, played thoroughly well by Meryl
Streep. Or the recently jilted daughter, played by Ms. Streep's own
natural daughter, Mamie Gummer. There is such a forced confection of
family relations that the cinema-goer experiences not interest or
complexity but apathy.
Then
there's Kevin Kline, who played the mercurial Otto in A
Fish Called Wanda,
lazing
through his
role like a satrap in his
opulent mansion, while being told by his first wife that he always
worked too hard. The cinema-goer doesn't see him do a tap or
break a sweat. He organises a disastrous
family
reunion dinner in an overly-lit high-end restaurant, with packed
neighbouring tables crowded about.
Petulance
and immaturity, rather than comedy, are the dominant vibes in the
scene.
Is
Dad
missing something? He
doesn't even offer Ricki a cup of coffee on arriving at his house, in
response to their daughter's collapse. And he asked her to come from
her L.A.
scrape-a-life,
in
the first place.
The
cinema-goer resorts to wondering how the animal wranglers got the big, white poodle to do the many things s/he does without seeming to be
acting. S/he's as effortless as Brando.
There
is a good band on view, doing covers of rock and roll Americana,
including the works of Tom Petty, Edgar Winter, Bruce Springsteen and
others. As soon as a wedding is mentioned, the cinema-goer knows the
finale will include the band on stage as Mom (Meryl Steep) gains some
redemption though rock and roll lyrics of love in place of actually
doing some loving. She is as selfish as an amoeba. Her
guitar-playing lover sells his prized instrument to fund the wedding
trip. The cinema-goer considers him a love-struck schmuck, for
martyring himself on Ricki the Narcissist, who, despite her
protestations, is not looking for love but simply for attention.
The
moral seems to be that some
of us follow our dreams into family and business and make a great
success of things, others
follow our dreams into rock and roll and perdition, but
what
matters is following your dream, each
one an approved
version
of the American Dream, while you keep the flag wrapped around you at
all times. In order to give the Meryl Streep character some depth,
she's presented as a blue-collar food-store worker, with a Stars and
Stripes tattoo on her back and an altar at
home
to her brother who was killed in Viet Nam. The film opens with the
band doing Tom Petty's American
Girl,
a classic of aspirations and dreams crashed into oblivion, given a
marvellous rock treatment, that makes everything
pathetically
alright and allows Ricki to be mildly jingoistic about America. Is
she being ironic? Doubtful.
There
is a bounteous African-American second wife, a gay son who looks even
more preppy than his straight brother, affronted in-laws, and a
loveable, dotty mother-in-law, all of whom look like they stepped out
of the window of a Tommy Hilfiger shop.
The
effect is not 'feel-good' but rather 'feel-nothing'.
The
cinema-goer experiences ennui and dismay. Is this it? Is this the
best that industrial film-making on a grand scale, coming out of
Hollywood, can produce? The cinema-goer’s companion notes there is
no story, never any sense of drama, nor of something being at stake in
the lives of the characters on the screen. Both cinema-goers burst
out laughing, not the intended effect sought by the film-makers, when
Mom says 'walk on' to the tear-filled daughter on the trip up the
aisle at her brother's wedding. It sounded like Johnny Cash enforcedly
crossed with Val Doonican.
On
leaving the cinema both
agree they made a mistake in choosing to see Ricki
and the Flash.
The chill in the air reminds them of a great Autumn film they once
saw.
The conversation tests
the cast list, the film title and the outline of the story. All tests
are
passed with flying colours: glorious
golds, flaming reds, searing pinks and sumptuous ochres. The film is
Far
from Heaven,
with Julianne Moore, Denis Quaid and Denis Haysbert and
a lush orchestral score by Elmer Bernstein. It might be time to view
it again. A decent story.
Fine acting and cinematography. Something
at stake.
The
music is
good
in both films, but in
Far
from Heaven
there is more
than cover versions. That's
it. Watching
Ricki
and the Flash,
the
cinema-goer is left with the feeling of watching a cover version of something
that wasn't very good in the first place.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623726/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
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