The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

“Once”: A Movie Musical?

June 25th, 2007

(This review also appears at LookingCloser.org)

So many times in the past decade, we’ve heard a film lauded as “the return of the movie musical.” Evita. Chicago. The Phantom of the Opera. The Producers. Dreamgirls. Next: Hairspray. Though Chicago has its Best Picture Oscar to back its claim, these “reborn” movie musicals often seem to fall flat. Part of the problem may actually lie with the style of the more recent musicals themselves: stage shows like Phantom wowed audiences because they jacked up the “spectacle” factor of theater to new heights and in fact tried to challenge cinema’s monopoly on razzle-dazzle—but it’s actually difficult for film to convey the visceral thrill of having a three-dimensional chandelier come swooping down over your head. Film, however, can capture finely tuned emotions in a close-up on a character’s face, in a shot of calloused fingers strumming a guitar—and it’s this intimate aspect of the medium that Once, the new “Irish rock musical,” successfully embraces.

Once, which has been charming film festivals, critics, and audiences alike, is about as far from grandiosity as you can imagine. In fact, the label “musical” is a little misleading, because all the movie’s songs occur in the context of rehearsals or performances by the musician characters; no random bursting into song here. Glen Hansard, real-life lead singer for The Frames (the band for which Once’s writer/director, John Carney, was formerly a bassist) , plays a Dublin busker moping after his lyin’, cheatin’ girlfriend (as he relates in a hilarious song called “Broken Hearted Hoover-Fixer Sucker Guy”—in addition to busking, he also helps out with his father’s vacuum cleaning business, hence the “Hoover-Fixer”).

He is prodded back into life gradually through the tenaciousness of a young Czech immigrant woman, also a musician—and, even better, she’s a musician with a broken vacuum cleaner. Once’s protagonists, known simply as the Guy and the Girl, discover how well his guitar-playing and her piano-playing blend, and they wonder if this musical harmony means that they are meant to be together romantically.

Once has also been dubbed a “love story,” and it is one, but not in the standard Hollywood mode. The love between Guy and Girl develops into the true kind of love that will sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the other. In some ways, the relationship between Guy and Girl actually reminds me of the relationship between the two main characters in Lost in Translation—both pairs have other commitments, but both pairs are drawn together in part by their shared status as outsiders. Guy and Girl, however, are much more easily likable and probably less in need of anti-depressants than Bill Murray’s and Scarlett Johansson’s characters. And, as compared to Lost in Translation, Once suggests much more hope in the ability of humans to communicate with each other, at least through music.

Watching Once, I several times wished for subtitles, for the song lyrics as well as the dialogue. The Dublin accents can be difficult to decipher. In spite of sometimes making up my own lyrics when I couldn’t understand the real ones, I didn’t feel mystified at any point about what the characters were feeling. Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who plays the Girl, are not trained actors, but they are musical collaborators in real life, and they prove to be powerful performers both of their own songs and of the dialogue written by Carney. The lyrics certainly give us a window into the characters’ lives, but it’s not necessary to understand every word.

Carney chooses the phrase “visual album” rather than “musical” to describe Once’s genre, and it’s true that, in some ways, Once is like a concept album illustrated with film. The music is the primary driving force, and the story seems to form organically around the songs—you never get the feeling, as you sometimes do in a musical, that the composers scratched their heads and said, “Now how can I make a song fit here?” No, as much as I love 1940s and 1950s musicals, I think the era of the “I’m going to break into song now” movie musical is gone. It either has to be done with self-reflexive cynicism, as in the hospital delivery-room dance scene in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, or simply and naturally, as in Once.

Once’s low budget is almost as famous as its rave reviews: the movie was made for under $200,000. (A higher budget had been planned, and rising star Cillian Murphy was slated to play the role of the Guy, but when he backed out, the film lost some of its producers. It’s only at that point that Hansard was cast as the singer of his own songs.) One of the things I noticed about Once was that neither Guy nor Girl had a cell phone—an oddity indeed in contemporary, tech-savvy Dublin, and no doubt a symbol of their outsider status. The lack of cell phones could also be a metaphor for the movie itself: a low-tech movie without glamour or special effects, relying on old-fashioned methods of communication—and delighting us, without the razzle-dazzle.

P.S. A couple of people have reminded me that Moulin Rouge is one recent movie musical that has succeeded artistically, critically, and popularly. True. And I like it, too. However, it is different from your standard movie musical in that (1) like Once, it never was a stage show; and (2) most of its songs aren’t original. In fact, the latter characteristic is one of the reasons it’s so interesting: the anachronism of 1980’s rock music in around-1900 Paris works, strangely. The movie does have one original song, “Come What May,” which is pretty standard musical fare in that it’s two people singing their feelings to each other. Maybe I’d like this song better if Ewan McGregor’s singing voice didn’t make me cringe.

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