If you ever have the unfortunate luck to find yourself in the same theater as "August Rush," here's my advice: Shut your eyes. This is a movie to be heard, not seen. A catastrophically wrongheaded film about an orphaned musical prodigy, "August Rush" is two hours of beautiful music stapled onto one of the dopiest movies I've ever seen. The soundtrack is transcendent. Everything else is dreck.
The film opens on a small child casually conducting an invisible symphony in the middle of a wheat field. Just as we begin to hear the music, a solemn voice-over inquires, "Can you hear the music?" Just checking, I guess.
The boy's name is Evan (Freddie Highmore), and judging by his wise blue eyes and ethereal demeanor, he's no ordinary kid. Blessed with supernatural musical aptitude, Evan has grown up unloved and unappreciated in an orphanage, where pastimes include ditch-digging and verbal abuse. As a rule, movie orphanages tend to exist so that the orphans in question have somewhere to run away from -- sure enough, Evan packs his bags and sets off to find his parents. I'm not quite sure how he winds up in Times Square two scenes later, but perhaps it's best not to ask.
Evan's birth parents are an Irish rocker named Louis Connelly (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and a concert cellist named Lyla Novacek (Keri Russell). They meet at a party, share a night of PG-rated passion, then are torn apart by Lyla's disapproving dad (William Sadler). Fearful that his daughter's resulting pregnancy may derail her musical ambitions, Lyla's father puts her baby up for adoption and tells Lyla it died at birth. Devastated by grief, she gives up her concert career and becomes a music teacher; Louis, meanwhile, abandons rock for investment banking. Both go on to lead boring, mopey lives, all the while carrying the torch for The One That Got Away.
Evan's plan to locate his parents is a little unorthodox. Rather than enlist the help of a friendly social worker (Terrence Howard), Evan believes that if he can play lots of music, his parents will hear him and show up with open arms. Accordingly, he gets a job as a street musician in New York City, under the wing of Wizard (Robin Williams). A few weeks later, Evan winds up conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra, but that's another story.
When Robin Williams showed up dressed like the love child of Chuck Norris and Bono, I rejoiced in the hope that he might bring some spark to the whole ponderous affair. No such luck. Like the rest of the talented cast, Williams is left stranded by a film that feels hurried and shapeless. There might have been a good movie somewhere in this mess, but if so, it's been horribly mangled in the editing room. Promising scenes of dramatic interchange have been whittled down to sound bytes, while others drag on to such interminable length that it feels like someone forgot to turn the camera off.
Unable to attain coherence, the film opts instead for sentimentality. For a story about an orphan lost on the streets of New York City, "August Rush" has the squeaky polish of a Disney movie; there's no sex, no violence, just a parade of heartwarming moments tethered together by an asinine narrative. The plot is clearly intended as a modern brush-up of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist," but it's a misconceived adaptation, dissolving the sarcastic wit of the original text and replacing it with wide-eyed solemnity.
Mark Mancina's delicate, evocative score -- by far the film's best component -- gently tugs on our heartstrings, urging us to take the film as seriously as possible. But then Wizard starts talking about "the harmonic connections between all living beings," and the whole thing falls apart.
The cast does its best to swim against the torrent of sap, but the actors are saddled with a screenplay that offers all the character development of a brick wall. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, such a dark and sumptuous presence in "Match Point," seems like he's acting through wool here; he and Keri Russell share a few promising moments, then spend the rest of the movie twiddling their thumbs. Freddie Highmore, meanwhile, plays a character so strange and inscrutable that he barely exists. As the film's protagonist, he wanders around whispering inane lines like "I follow the music!" until you just want to plug him into an iPod.
All this culminates in a conclusion that may be one of the most implausibly contrived moments ever committed to film. I'm willing to accept that an 11-year-old child can get a job conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra (why not?), but the ludicrous series of coincidences that follow moves beyond implausibility into the realm of self-indulgence.
I don't mind unrealistic movies, so long as they stick to their own set of rules. "August Rush" doesn't have any rules. Instead, it's driven by the all-consuming desire to be cute and harmless and lovable. There's not a single moment of emotional authenticity in the whole damn thing, just a bunch of great musical numbers and not much else. Save two hours and buy the soundtrack instead.
