Like a great song, Begin Again is all about the build-up.
It’s a long road of meh, though, until the electrifying, invigorating, chill-inducing third act, which almost makes up for a choppy beginning and sometimes dull middle bit. Keira Knightley stars as Greta, a Londoner in New York with her beau, next-big-thing-in-music Dave Kohl (a surprising Adam Levine). She writes songs with him, sometimes for him, and they’re madly in love until she hears one of his new tunes and deduces that it’s about another woman. Disgruntled, she sings about loneliness at a dingy club later that night, where Dan (Mark Ruffalo, phenomenal as usual), drunk as a skunk, imagines Greta being backed by a pianist, violinist, cellist and drummer. It’s magic, he thinks and hopes.
Director John Carney is no stranger to movies about musicians, having helmed the Oscar-winning Once, like Begin Again only in that it features a male and female lead making music together. Begin Again, with its bigger budget and New York setting, is much glossier, its songs much more poppy and radio-ready. I preferred the songs in Begin Again, so much so that I was missing the music when the film veered into its sometimes trite dialogue. (Conversely, I thought Once was beautifully filmed, and felt authentic because it was authentic and shot for peanuts) When Dan suggests Greta work on her stage presence and let him put her in some better outfits, she naively retorts: “Music is for the ears, not the eyes … People want authenticity.” He asks: Do you have a Facebook page? MySpace? Come on. Some of the film felt like it was written by a dinosaur pretending to know what young folk think of the music industry. (Carney wrote the film’s screenplay. In another scene, Dan’s 14-year-old daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld) says her outfit is sexy because she got it from American Apparel.) “Maybe the kids are right. Maybe music should be free,” Dan says at a meeting at the record label he helped found. There, his partner’s million-dollar idea to saving the industry is having musicians record commentaries on albums.
Chris Hanna 