There’s something special about John Carney’s cinematic love letters to music that pierces through cynicism and warms the heart, even under the least impressive circumstances. Once should be unremarkable in its simplicity, but it is tender and soulful; Sing Street should be mere 80s nostalgia-bait, but it’s fun and inspiring. It’s easy to credit that to the music, which is so vital a character in Carney’s films and what tends to be what most people remember from them. However, I think there is a rich humanity to his writing, and the way he develops his characters as well that accounts for how his movies consistently work. And I don’t think that’s anywhere more apparent than in Flora and Son, his first movie in seven years (in the meantime, he’s developed, written, and directed much of the series Modern Love). This is a movie that really doesn’t seem to have much going for it on paper –even its premise is fairly weak, and yet it is ultimately quite delightful.
It’s a low-key domestic comedy-drama set in a Dublin suburb. Eve Hewson’s Flora, a young, drained and struggling single mother has a very hostile relationship with her teenager Max (Orén Kinlan), who has had frequent run-ins with the law and a lack of motivation in life. After salvaging a neighbour’s guitar from their rubbish as a birthday present that Max has no interest in, she decides to learn to play for herself –drawn in particular to one online guitar teacher out in Los Angeles, Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who hesitantly takes her on as a student.
As Flora gradually learns to play and reconnect with her son over a shared enthusiasm for music (albeit of different kinds) it’s all pretty slight and cute; and there are moments where the shallowness of plot is very apparent. Specifically late in the film where Max regresses in a highly formulaic beat and the resultant heartfelt advocacy of his mother in light of how she’s learned to value the kid she’d earlier openly fantasized about being taken away from her. In fact the empathy and understanding she achieves is somewhat ambiguous -it’s unclear exactly what or what confluence of things turn her around. And in these moments where Carney indulges in a fairly cheap ethos and aspects of stereotype (Flora’s seen to be sexually promiscuous at the beginning too -initially only signing up for Jeff’s course because she’s attracted to him), the movie feels inescapably rote, and no different than a hundred similar stories of estranged individuals coming together.
Yet around these and even in subtle ways within them, there’s a spark. Certainly some of it comes from Hewson, who delivers a really enjoyable performance, even if it’s entirely unbelievable the daughter of Bono doesn’t know how to play the guitar. In particular, the sardonic comic beats she plays well -the defence mechanism for this woman frustrated by being seemingly at the end of her rope -griping to a friend about this being all her life will amount to. The movie doesn’t openly interrogate the dissolution of whatever hopes and dreams she might have had or the genuinely thematically difficult conflict within her of regretting Max’s birth, but it’s there informing her character nonetheless; most pronounced in those lessons with Jeff whereby she envisions him in her presence -one of Carney’s deceptively simple choices that speaks intensely to Flora’s loneliness (and the strength of their connection) as well as being a convenient way to involve more viscerally an actor otherwise confined for the duration of the movie to a computer screen.
The healthier relationship with Max that comes around isn’t particularly hacky either. Rather than depict him falling in love with music in the same way, the script has him much more interested in the sound of his generation. He’s into rapping, emceeing, creating sounds primarily through technical tools, and the movie never invalidates this or uses it as a further wedge between him and his mother -or his father, played by Jack Reynor, with whom he spends a fair bit of time and who was himself part of a failed band. Carney’s big thesis here seems to be that music in all its forms can bring people together. In part to make a video to impress his crush at school, Max and Flora collaborate under the name “Flora and Son”, which as you would expect survives the rockiness of Max’s consequences.
The movie doesn’t take much of an interest in Max though in spite of this: Flora is the key character and she grows more through Jeff’s influence than her son. But it’s just one of those things where the movie appears to miss a step or make a narrative fumble or just submit to a cliché, only to fare alright in terms of effectiveness. Everybody is invested and the mood hits the right notes in the scenes where it is most important. Like Flora taking her lesson with Jeff on a rooftop and making plans to go visit him in L.A. as a song they sing heightens their new-found bond. It’s saccharine but legitimately heartfelt too. There’s even a scene earlier where Flora cries while listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, a mood and needle-drop combo that firmly belongs to Love, Actually -and yet it doesn’t feel disingenuous, or like a shallow copy.
A reason for this is likely because Carney places a lot of stock in music, this song and Jeff’s rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” illustrating a couple really effective moments. The original songs for this film are a bit mixed, not so strong or intense as in Carney’s previous movies. Usually he has one number (that he co-writes with another artist -in this case songwriter Gary Clark) that is built up and framed as the centrepiece track of the film: obviously “Falling Slowly” in Once, “Lost Stars” in Begin Again, “Drive It Like You Stole It” in Sing Street. Here it’s the resolving closing number called “High Life” (though an argument could be made for the ballad “Meet in the Middle” -the movie’s other good song), and it’s a charming, upbeat song that utilizes Hewson and Kinlan’s vocal talents well -although it seems designed to play chiefly in the setting that it’s depicted in: a pub in a Dublin suburb (and the song is very Irish). I don’t imagine it’ll have the awards-season legs of those previous examples, but it’s more than a fine listen.
And Flora and Son is more than a fine movie, deceptively so in several regards. It’s comfortable, in both the good and bad connotations of that term; but its apparent slightness masks a surprisingly authentic warmth. Good performances, a fun script, and a likeable score help too. Perhaps Carney’s got some approximation of a Lubitsch Touch -whatever it is, I’m grateful for it.
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