It is truly a
sad state of affairs when the most impressive acting in a film featuring Meryl
Streep and Kevin Kline is a performance from former rock icon, Rick
Springfield. Not since Will Smith and his obnoxious pseudo-celebrity child
collaborated with M. Night Shyamalan to make the post-apocalyptic disaster of a
film, After Earth, has an actor been
so horribly blinded by the urge to work with their own undeserving offspring. This
is the kind of performance that would kill most careers, though the lack of
famous actresses her age allows Streep the freedom to make a Mamma Mia every few years, without
repercussion. As much as Streep’s growling and guttural performance as an aging
wannabe rock star may be like nails on a chalkboard to anyone who has ever
actually held a guitar, it is nowhere near as obnoxious as the obviously
nepotistic casting of her real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer. And all of this is
sloppily held together by a lazy and reductive screenplay from Hollywood
Streep stars as
Ricki Rendazzo, an aging and failing musician working as a grocery store clerk
between weekend gigs at a dive bar in Temecula, CA. When she receives news from
her ex-husband (Kline) that her only daughter (Gummer) is getting a divorce,
Ricki returns home to try and fix the relationships she has neglected for
decades. If this plot sounds familiar, that is because it is nearly exactly the
same as Danny Collins, minus the fame
and believable performances. This is a huge difference to screenwriter Diablo
Cody, but not because Ricki is unsuccessful; rather, what is significant to her
is the fact that Ricki is a woman.
In one of the more obnoxiously biased
sequences of the film, Ricki laments that her choices in life would have been
celebrated had she been a man rather than a woman. The evidence given is the
fact that Mick Jagger has many kids by different wives, and Ricki makes the
assumption that all of these kids consider the Rolling Stones frontman a good
father. Not only do I find this assumption insulting to the kids of Jagger, but
I also don’t think that this statement would be anywhere close to the same had
the Rolling Stones met a similar amount of fame and success as Ricki and the
Flash. This is less about feminism than it is about our culture’s adoration of
fame and success, though Cody would have you believe that it is another case of
gender inequality.
When Cody wrote
her first screenplay, it was met with a great deal of (underserved) attention.
The dialogue was hip and over-written, and she was treated as the voice of a
new generation for a few months. As many years as have passed, Cody has yet to
come anywhere near the success of Juno,
though now her desperate attempts at remaining hip and relevant now appear as
cliché as possible in terms of structure, and bluntly archaic when it comes to
the dialogue. She is still using the word “gay” in a derogatory manner (Wake
up, Cody, it’s no longer the 1990’s) and in the same scene that a group of
middle-aged adults also use the phrase “Cray-Cray.”
The third
disappointment of this film comes from director Jonathan Demme, who I had hoped
would be the film’s only saving grace from a contrived sentimental resolution.
In the past decade, Demme has stayed within the confines of art cinema and
documentary filmmaking (as well as a surprising amount of television work),
neither of which has a strong tolerance for cliché material. Though the last
thing I wanted was another Rachel Getting
Married (or A Master Builder, for
that matter), part of me hoped that this style would at least shave some of the
more predictable elements out of Cody’s ‘script-by-numbers’ screenplay.
Instead, Demme’s voice is hardly noticeable amidst the work of Streep and the
stripper.
Even the editing of the film treats
the audience like complete morons, listing the name of each city as the
narrative enters it, despite there only being two locations in the entire film
and dialogue to establish where the scenes take place moments before or after
the large text appears. It is almost comical to see the announcement that we
are in Temecula only moments after Ricki has shouted “Thank you, Temecula!”
from onstage. It is one thing to dumb down your film for audiences, but this is
so dumb that it nearly feels like a parody of another film, with Streep’s rock
persona resembling the type of caricature typically seen on “Saturday Night
Live.”
In the most comically contrived
scenes of the film, Ricki shows up at a wedding to play a song with her rock
band and is met by outrageously bad overacting by nearly all of the background
actors. When Ricki begins to play rock music, the reaction is so absurdly
exaggerated that these extras look as though they have been borrowed from the
film Footloose. One woman even covers
her ears, as though rock music (old enough to be considered classic rock, no
less) is still seen as culturally offensive. This seems to be further evidence
of Cody’s sad attempt to retain her rebellious credibility amongst youth, but
that died the moment that she used “Cray Cray” in her screenplay.
Exclusive to the Blu-ray are a
handful of special features not available on the DVD release. This is clever,
as there is no other reason to splurge for a high definition presentation of a
film such as this. Even if it were well made, this is not the type of movie
that demands extra clarity in either the visuals or the audio. These extras
include deleted scenes, a cast photo gallery, and a featurette about Springfield
Entertainment Value:
4.5/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 3/10
Historical
Significance: 2/10
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