SONGCATCHER Written and Directed by Maggie Greenwald With Janet McTeer, Aidan Quinn Theater PG-13 112 min.
There should be a special place in purgatory for filmmakers who dig into a wonderful subject and ruin it for everybody else by making a bad movie. Maggie Greenwald's Songcatcher ventures into the mountains of Appalachia at the turn of the last century to mine the rich traditions of the folk music that had come over with immigrants from the British Isles a couple of centuries before and had survived, almost unchanged, to that time. The music is good. But the story, the writing, and the direction are a travesty. Songcatcher is artistic strip mining, leaving the territory it plunders bare, forlorn, and unusable.
Greenwald has researched her subject and drawn on historical characters, but the fictional characters and situations she has created don't suggest real people in that place at that time. Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) is a musicologist at an Eastern college. She's a feisty one, aggressive sexually and ambitious professionally. When she's rejected for tenure because of her gender, it riles her up.
This happens in the first scene, and it's a revealing scene for its self-conscious exposition. She's been passed over in favor of a male musicologist -- "Cyrus Whittle,' her department chairman announces smugly, `who, as you know, has almost singlehandedly created the revival of the English folk song." Scene after scene will follow this lead – uneasy, unconvincing moments between badly drawn characters assembled to advance a forced narrative and an afterthought of a love story, all in the service of a set of late-20th century perspectives on social issues.
After her snub in academia, Dr. Penleric heads off to Appalachia to visit her sister Elna (Jane Adams) who has started a mountain school with her friend Harriet (E. Katherine Kerr). When Lily discovers the two are lesbians, she's disgusted, but she finds a welcome distraction in the treasure of old folk songs that the mountain people sing. She starts collecting the songs, on paper and on wax cylinders, but she runs into opposition from a local named Tom (Aidan Quinn), who suspects that she's out to exploit his people.
How he comes to change his mind about her, how she gradually sheds her uppity, pedantic airs, how the lesbian cat escapes the bag and triggers melodrama, heartbreak, and destruction in paradise, are matters best left for the movie to unfold. Sequences like the one in which Lily runs in panic through the nighttime woods and emerges into a field in broad daylight provide the respite of puzzlement. The music makes some of it bearable, but even the musical scenes are not an unalloyed gift. There are a few pure moments, such as the great bluesman Taj Mahal being trotted out for one brief guitar riff and then packed off again into the wings, but Aidan Quinn, fine actor though he is, fails to convince either with his playing of the banjo or the guitar or the character. The orphan Deladis (Emmy Rossum) and the old granny Viney (Pat Carroll) sing us a number of ballads, and do pretty well with the music, but the acting is a burden. McTeer is a former Oscar nominee, but here the odds are stacked against her.
Any movie that can arouse compassion is worthy of notice, and this movie does arouse compassion for the poor actors, exposed in scene after scene without the decent covering of adequate dialogue or direction.
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