John Carney's 'Flora and Son' sings a familiar song
Eve Hewson shines in the new Apple TV+ film from the director of 'Once,' but the formula is starting to wear thin.
John Carney's films all have a simple moral: A great song can solve just about anything. This formula worked to perfection in 2007's Once, and had more intermittent success with 2013's Begin Again and 2016's Sing Street.
Carney's latest film and his first in seven years, Flora and Son, has its moments, and sports a very strong lead performance from Eve Hewson. But the formula is beginning to wear thin- and this time around, the songs just aren't that great.
Once, released back in 2007, was one of the sweetest films of the current century, telling a bare-bones story of a pair of buskers in Dublin ( Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) who make beautiful music together. The song won an Oscar for Best Original Song — although I could have sworn I had heard "Falling Slowly" performed at least a year earlier by Hansard's band The Frames.)
The film was an out-of-nowhere phenomenon and led to a hit Broadway musical. I didn't hate Begin Again or Sing Street, but neither quite reached the height of Once, and Flora and Son doesn't either.
The new film, which opens in theaters this week and lands on Apple TV+ next Friday, after becoming a rare movie to play at both the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals.
It stars Hewson (the daughter of Bono and co-star of the fantastic Apple series Bad Sisters) as Flora, a mess of a single mom who lives in Dublin and has trouble relating to her 14-year-old son (Orén Kinlan.) Jack Reynor, the bad boyfriend from Midsommar, plays her ex-husband, also a musician.
Flora decides to gift her son a guitar, and bond with him through music. But since she doesn't know how to play herself, she seeks out a guitar tutor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who teaches her lessons about both music and romance. When I first saw the actor on screen, I thought maybe she was taking one of those online Master Classes from the actual Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but he's playing a fictional character.
The tutor, alas, is based in Los Angeles while she's in Dublin, so they have essentially a romance-by-Zoom (although because it's Apple, I guess they're using FaceTime.) The film does use a device at times when they appear like they're in the same room, but overall they're talking on screens, which brings back not-so-great memories of the cinema of the pandemic.
Mother and son, and teacher and student, are of course brought together through music, and it's charming to a degree. But it's all undercut by the songs not being particularly good. The triumphant song at the end, in fact, is especially bad.
Apple is clearly hoping for another CODA, the music-focused film, also with a female protagonist, that won it a Best Picture Oscar a couple of years ago. Both films even prominently feature the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now." And while CODA’s awards win feels a lot these days like a COVID-era fever dream, it’s still an altogether better movie than Flora and Son.
Two things can be true. I loved CODA and it never should have won Best Picture. Maybe years from now film historians will look back and say it won because we were in the COVID era and wanted something uplifting?