Film Review: Begin Again

John Carney is an Irish writer-director who garnered much praise for his film ‘Once’ about an immigrant and a busker in Ireland making music together. Here he makes a film about a recently fired record producer and a jilted English singer who make music together. I guess films about music is his thing. Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightly are our leads over the course of this elongated music video set in New York city. Keira is there with the unlikeable Adam Levine (yes, of Maroon 5 fame) playing her unlikeable boyfriend who has found fame as his songs were featured in a movie. He quickly ditches her to hook up with an assistant at the record company that signed him and moved them to NYC. Mark Ruffalo fares slightly better as a, oh cliché of clichés, hard drinking absent father who manages to rebuild a bond with his daughter over their love of Keira Knightley’s music. “let’s record an album and use the city as our studio” is The Hulks cry after being dejected by his old record company, they do so of course and produce songs that sound oddly like they were recorded in an expensive recording studio. In fact it seems odd that the recording of the album takes so long to come into play, being around the one hour mark before they finally get started.

Cee Lo Green pops up to show the unlikable Adam Lavine that he’s not the only one who can do one dimensional acting, all the while being referred to as Troublegum for no rhyme or reason. The film is a jumbled mess in my opinion, its core message seems to be about not selling out, whilst featuring prominent shots of Ms Knightley booking a flight with a Capital One credit card. One scene sees Kiera and Adam move from a perfectly fine coffee shop to sit on some-ones steps at the front of their house, Adam then gives Kiera a CD that she listens to on his iPhone, how she fit it in the sim card holder I’ll never know. My guess is that these touches are used to help capture the ‘feel’ of NYC, a la Woody Allen.  However if they really wanted to capture NYC they should’ve featured shots of people bumping into one another at every corner whilst locals scream at tourists and taxi drivers refuse to pick them unless they’re taking a long enough journey. There’s also some sort of mixed message about letting Adam Levine make pop songs out of a ballad you wrote for him, but I’m not sure what message is? Maybe that it’s bad, or it’s good, or that running away from his concert (as Keira does) is the answer. I just hope it’s not something I have to deal with later in life as I’m wholly unprepared for it.

The relationship between Ruffalo and Knightley also had me peering through my fingers as they played a will-they-won’t-they cat and mouse love game throughout, with cringe worthy results, like watching your parents have a snog. The horrific scene where they wander round NYC sharing an iPhone with a headphone splitter had me more nauseous than drinking a Baileys and Coke. Knightley’s attempts at dancing only being upstaged by her own inability to sing along to her apparently favourite song. I felt leaving this relationship as expressly platonic throughout would have benefited the movie, as they both had other love interests that more than took up their time. James Cordon appeared as Keira’s unic friend, the only male not beguiled by her awkward charms and disappearing top lip, his turn in the movie oddly being one of the more pleasant aspects. The music was great however and perfectly suited the tone of the film, it all just felt a little over produced considering it was supposed to have been recorded on the streets.

You can see what this film was trying to achieve but there’s too much money and it’s too polished for it to appear genuine in its sentimentality, the characters are too clichéd and Knightley seems out of place and out of her depth. The film also seems to end on an odd note, Keira cycling along as many of the films issues go unanswered. Then, much like the ‘outtakes’ appear at the end of Toy Story, the finale appears in small boxes as the credits take up the majority of the screen, as if an after-thought to help tie up all the loose ends. I’m not sure what the significance of using this method is, but I do know I found it hard to stay to the end of this film and at this point it felt like the film itself found it hard to stay the course as well.