Begin Again

[rsadelle]

I kind of wanted to see Begin Again anyway, and then lakeeffectgirl kept talking about how great it is, so I put it on my calendar and went to see it on Saturday.

If you want a very detailed recap of the movie, go read lakeeffectgirl's post. Here's my brief recap so you know what I'm talking about: Dan (Mark Ruffalo) is a failed music executive. Gretta (Keira Knightley) is a songwriter who doesn't want to be a rock star. They meet on the day he's been fired and shortly after she's left her boyfriend Dave (Adam Levine) because he fell in love with someone else. Gretta is staying with her friend Steve (James Corden). Dan is separated from his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener in a look that generally reminded me very much of the Jewish women my mother's age I knew growing up), a music journalist, and doesn't see his teenage daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld) very often. Dan and Gretta assemble a band and fight crime record an album in various New York City locales.

The opening scene of the movie is Steve getting Gretta up on stage in a bar to play one of her songs and Dan hearing her. It took me a little while to get into the movie because we see that scene multiple times and the what brought Dan to here piece is before the what brought Gretta to here piece. I grew to like Dan over time, but the whole of his day before the bar had me mentally rolling my eyes about how much I'm not interested in badly behaving, drunk, middle-aged dude stories. But if you have a bunch of people from various places (Dan, Gretta, Steve, a pair of string musicians who will play anything as long as it's "not fucking Vivaldi," a pianist who's been working for tiny child ballet classes, and a bassist and drummer paid by Troublegum [CeeLo Green], a rapper who owes all his success to Dan) coming together to work on some project that involves both them becoming a family and one or more montages, you will have a high chance of winning me over, and Begin Again very much did.

Now the things you need to know to get to what I thought was the very best part of the movie. While they're recording, Dan and Gretta become close. She asks him about the splitter hanging from the rearview mirror of his car, and he tells her that on his first date with Miriam, they walked around New York listening to music together and got married two months later. (The splitter requires some suspension of disbelief, both that it would still be in pristine shape years and years later and that Gretta, for whom music is so important, wouldn't know what it was.) Dan and Gretta do the same, in a really great sequence that ends with the two of them going back to where she's crashing with Steve. They look at each other without speaking, and then Steve pops up from the other side of the kitchen counter and breaks the moment. Later, while drunk, Gretta writes a song and she and Steve play it into Dave's voice mail, which, of course, makes Dave reconsider having left her. Dave and Gretta meet up, and he asks her to come to his show and see what one of her songs he's recorded does for an audience. (Oh. I've been thinking that the question of how Gretta can afford to eat during this summer is left as an exercise for the reader, but it just occurred to me that maybe she's making money off of Dave's success. I know practical details aren't that important to stories that are essentially fairy tales, but it still has to have an internal consistency that no source of income didn't quite seem to have to me.) At her request, he plays her arrangement of the song, and he says before he plays that it's a song given to him by someone special, and if she's there, he'd like her to come up and play it with him.

This is where the movie becomes amazing. Gretta stands at the side of the stage and watches him. He looks over and sees her, smiles at her. I've seen a lot of movies and I know how they work, so the whole time he was playing, I was thinking, "This is the moment where she steps onto the stage and starts singing with him." But she never does. She cries, a few tears running down her face, and then she leaves. Dave looks over to see she's gone, and he cries, a few tears running down his face, as he finishes the song. We get that intercut with shots of Gretta brightly and brilliantly happy, wind blowing her hair back as she rides the bike she impulse bought while Dave was out of town falling in love with someone else, and shots of Dan and Miriam on a bench, each with their own pair of headphones and a phone or iPod between them.

I really, really thought this was going to be structured like a romantic comedy where the whole path of Gretta making an album was going to lead her either back to Dave or into a relationship with Dan. The fact that the movie doesn't go there, that Gretta is both happy and (romantically) alone at the end is what really makes it stand out.

That said, this is not some feminist utopia, and I want to acknowledge the things that made me twitch, aside from the aforementioned focus on middle-aged dude problems. The first time Gretta meets Violet, she talks to her about clothes and boys. I liked that part of her advice was that Violet needed to figure out if she really likes the guy or if he's just the guy you're supposed to have a crush on. What I didn't like was Gretta saying of her outfit, "It doesn't leave much to the imagination, does it?" I got a Gretta as prim and proper classy lady in contrast to Violet the slutty teenager vibe that I didn't like. (Better would have been asking her if she really likes the way she dresses or if it's just the way you're supposed to dress to be "sexy.") There are no queer people in the movie. The (few) people of color in the movie are secondary characters and they're all men. I loved that Steve was at every stage a platonic friend of Gretta's, but I think there's a point you could make about how the slightly chubby/not traditionally attractive man is only ever a sidekick.

In the epilogue that plays over the credits, Gretta goes to Dan's as he's packing up to move home with Miriam and Violet, and they put her album online for a dollar. They get Troublegum to tweet about it, and by the time Dan's partner at the record company (whose offer of a deal Gretta spurned) hears about it the next day, they've sold ten thousand copies. I think there's something interesting in corporate funded/produced entertainment selling us a vision that's contrary to the corporate profit over all else capitalist mindset: Gretta makes her album on her own terms with the help of people who just love music, doesn't want to be a rock star, refuses to change to fit someone else's idea of what would make her music sell, and ends up happy and successful. I have a lot of doubt that capitalist systems actually work that way, and it makes me wonder what the purpose of continuing to sell that vision is. Is it just to make us feel good? Does it distract people from other problems? If we believe we can make that happen, does it mean we don't engage with the real struggles of workers in and inequalities of the system? I'm really sorry I was thwarted in my attempt to see Chef over the weekend, because the trailer looked like it might have some of the same themes, and I would have liked to have been able to compare them.