REFORMED DRUNK
MUSIC OF THE HEART Directed by Wes Craven Screenplay by Pamela Gray from the memoir by Roberta Guaspari With Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn De Vargas PG 124 min.
To repeat that Meryl Streep is the most gifted movie actress of her generation is to be the bearer of no startling news. One of Streep's most remarkable qualities as an actress is that she finds her personality and mannerisms in her characters, whereas most actors, even very good ones, bring their own personae to the character. In "Music of the Heart", a movie based on a true story previously told in the documentary "Small Wonders", she plays Roberta Guaspari, a determined woman who teaches violin to kids at an East Harlem elementary school. Streep spent two months intensively learning the instrument, and she hardens her jaw and thickens her speech into the patterns of a small-town girl and Navy wife whose horizons are defined by her marriage and her music.
When the marriage falls apart, she's helplessly adrift until a chance meeting with an old friend (Aidan Quinn) leads to her traveling to New York to land a job. Streep's face as she rides a taxi through Harlem, clutching her pocket book to her breast, tells you everything you need to know about this woman.
Sadly, there is more to the movie than Streep's acting. There is also a screenplay, stitched together by Pamela Gray like a quilt of the most familiar material she can find. Gray has gathered her patches from every movie ever made about teachers in inner city schools, without ever stumbling across any with dramatic value. The result is a series of monotonous, colorless, repetitive and boring scenes about a life that would not appear to be worth the telling if it were not for a lively and stirring grand finale at the movie's end. When Guaspari's school program is threatened with a budget redline, she pulls together a benefit "Fiddlefest" that winds up in Carnegie Hall with guest artists like Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern sharing the stage with Roberta and her students. Only at this late point does the Kleenex come out, and the two hour ordeal rises at last to a satisfying conclusion. The presence of these virtuosi and the legendary venue brings some magic, but it is magic that is borrowed, not earned.
The role of Roberta Guaspari was originally Madonna's, but she took a powder a couple of weeks before shooting started. Too bad. Madonna's acting talent would have been less at odds with the level of the material. The shocker is that this drab and uneventful exercise is directed by that master slasher, Wes Craven ("Nightmare on Elm Street", "Scream"). In his effort to mend his ways, Craven has crawled into the soft shell of the reformed drinker who used to be life of the party, but now bores everyone to tears.
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