By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Kate Barker-Froyland
Starring: Anne Hathaway | Ben Rosenfield | Johnny Flynn | Mary Steenburgen | Sharon van Etten
Country: united_states
Year: 2015
Running time: 86
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2182972
Jason says: “There are times when SONG ONE starts to come across as a simple enough romance that its peculiar start fades into the background, and it’s odd for that to feel like a good thing. The way the two parties meet doesn’t work, and it’s the whole foundation of the movie, but there are enough nice moments afterward that work regardless.
“After all, it starts with a 19-hear-old musician (Ben Rosenfield), headphones blocking everything out, getting struck by a car. His sister Franny (Anne Hathaway), a graduate student doing research in Morocco, is called home by their mother (Mary Steenburgen), and while she does what she can to help draw him out of his coma, she decides to use the James Forester concert ticket she finds in his notebook. She talks to the musician (Johnny Flynn) afterward, telling him her comatose brother Henry is his biggest fan; he comes by the hospital. And so on.
“That whole situation is weird, right? It’s weird from Henry apparently only having interest in this one other musician, to Franny hanging around after the show to drop all this on him, to the next day when she asks James to meet her at a show after he shows up to see them at the hospital. Certainly, there are details that make it less off-putting than that sounds, but we don’t know Franny well enough when she hits this folk musician with her brother’s coma or when she figures a hospital visit is the right time to make a date for it to seem like something natural rather than writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland trying to force her movie’s concept. Of course, it’s supposed to be weird, but we don’t see Franny wrestling with the awkwardness of it much.
“On the other hand, the two halves of the movie that you get if you sort of ignore how things started are both done rather well. Franny handles Henry’s coma like the anthropologist she is, following his diary to discover the things he loves and places he lives, recording them and bringing the sounds to him (or putting pancakes from his favorite diner under his nose), and it’s a sweetly melancholy little story. The little details are nicely observed, even if they might bring some to snort at Brooklyn hipster quirk, and Barker-Froyland seldom feels the need to spell things out too obviously.
“The other part of the movie is a love story that is fairly sweet as well, a natural but not forced pairing of two smart, capable people who don’t know what to do in their current situations and need someone to get them through. As decent as Johnny Flynn is as James, though, it’s pretty clear watching any scene of him and Anne Hathaway which one is the movie star and which one is the musician who occasionally acts. Hathaway is a real pleasure to watch, though, both when showing the nervous emotional conflict in Franny’s head as she tries to type on her laptop while sitting next to her brother’s hospital bed or letting everything out. She also gets to play off Mary Steenburgen as the siblings’ mother; that pairing does a fine job of mirroring each other while also delivering some very believable friction.
“The film doesn’t build to a hugely dramatic climax, which initially seems kind of unsatisfying, even if it doesn’t have a poor ending. Still, there’s enough nuggets of good material to it- including a soundtrack featuring songs by Jenny Lewis & Johnathan Rice – to make it a nice movie for a quiet evening. 3.5 cats
“Seen 29 January 2015 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)”
Kyle says: “SONG ONE is a modest romantic sleeper about Franny (Anne Hathaway), who is hastily summoned back to New York by her mother Karen (Mary Steenburgen) when her brother Henry (Ben Rosenfield) is injured in a near-fatal taxi accident, comatose in a local hospital. Franny has been doing research on nomadic tribes in Morocco, and her relationship with Henry has been distant and strained. Knowing that Henry wanted more than anything to be a singer/songwriter, and that his idol was a soulful modestly successful British folkie named James Forrester, Franny attends a concert given by James at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC. She tells him about her brother, and a tentative friendship commences after James visits Henry’s hospital room and plays a song for the young man. James has an opportunity for emotional intimacy with a young woman who understands his music, and Franny is given another chance at a relationship with her brother, reading his diary, visiting favorite restaurants, and listening to music he likes from the alternative singing/songwriting scene in Williamsburg. SONG ONE wisely leaves unanswered questions about what happens after the end titles.
“To label SONG ONE a modest romantic sleeper is meant as a great compliment. One might also call it unpretentious and emotionally satisfying. Not only is it very specifically a movie about New York, but also it is a story about the potential of music to be transcendent, involving and transformational. What can be communicated in lyrics is made vivid by the addition of music in all the film’s songs, which were composed by Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice. Having greatly admired Anne Hathaway’s recent Off-Broadway performance in George Brant’s play GROUNDED, a deadly serious meditation on a one-time F-16 combat pilot who is retrained and reassigned to remotely control drone strikes seated at a computer console near Las Vegas, I acquired even greater respect for her skill in often seeming to do nothing other than listening and occasionally reacting in her scenes with both Johnny Flynn and Ben Rosenfield. Of particular note for seeming simplicity but actual emotional complexity are scenes between Hathaway and Flynn late at night on the Brooklyn side of the East River, looking at the bright lights of Manhattan. Writer/director Kate Barker-Froyland has given audiences a welcome respite from the noise and nonsense of most current cable TV offerings. 4 cats
“Seen Saturday, September 5, 2015, on The Movie Channel, Time Warner Cable, New York.”