I thought it was going to be a 4 but it was at least a 5. I know I’m getting on this train a little late, but to be honest, every time I saw the trailer for this movie, I shook my fucking head and said I’d never be that desperate to see something. Then, while taking my mom around Monterey this weekend, there was a two hour back up on the 101, so we decided to see something rather than talk in traffic. Hearts Beat Loud is a better alternative to 30 extra minutes in traffic.
Hearts Beat Loud‘s not-so-stealthy gay storyline made me think a lot about some of the other films that have portrayed gay culture this and last year, Call Me By Your Name (the pretty one about rich Americans summering in the Italian countryside), Love, Simon (the one about rich Americans angsting about coming out to their accepting friends and family), and, surprisingly enough, Blockers (the one about a group of white girls who conspire to lose their virginity on prom night). That last Slate article by Lena Wilson is what got me thinking about the way that gay storylines get marketed, how they slip past trailers, and what is going on when they fly below the radar.
Back in April, I was intrigued, because Love, Simon was getting a lot of warm and fuzzy air time, and though I think Josh Duhamel does a great job as Simon Spier and I really like how close the actors playing Simon’s friends are to actually being high school seniors (Riverdale, you’re also not doing to shabby yourselves, compared to the 90s), I still walked away feeling kind of meh. I’m accepting of the fact that not every movie is made for me, and that I lack some of the essential human decency and life experiences that might make a movie like this thrum at my frequency, but I’d like to think I could still spot the difference between an Important Film and an interesting film (I don’t tend to like mainstream, feel-good movies, that reward me for tolerating difference, which is why I don’t think I’m likely to see Wonder or The Greatest Showman any time soon). I have a friend at work who I told this to, and she agreed that she too found no drama in the acceptance of LGBTQ brothers and sisters, but that not all communities are so forward-thinking and that it’s important for Other People to see the movie and have it normalized. I think that’s wrong and we should demand more from progressive comedies.
Lena’s meditation on Blockers gave me a way of thinking of both movies in terms of my expectations going into the movie and why I felt like I got a little bit more out of the kids’ arcs in Blockers than in Simon’s. It also reminded me of why I was so distraught in Mother! and why my friend was so bored by It Comes at Night (actually, after checking, too many people are writing about “misleading trailers” and “deceptive marketing” with this movie). The gay love story in HBL is tightly wrapped inside of a father-daughter movie. Sam’s sexuality isn’t really a big deal in the film. No one questions it. It’s not a crisis of identity. Her father Frank doesn’t linger on it when they have one of their cool dad jam sessions, he even guesses she has a girlfriend BEFORE he guesses boyfriend just so that the movie can show you how woke he is (and he is nothing if not the epitome of cool). Sam’s conflicted feelings about the lingering time she has left with her new girlfriend Rose, with her father, and the emptiness she feels at the absence of her mother all provide the building materials for her two songs in the film.
The script is a novel hybrid of musical and prose-poetry. It’s not quite a musical, but features a little too much music not to be something lyrical. It has a musical number as a refrain. Lines spoken prompt lyrics and loop back on previous conversations during the finale, the concert at Red Hook Records. Aside from being lyrical, the script is fine with living with doubt. Every earnest statement–and all the best lines–are qualified and questioned in one way or another: “Every song is a love song,” pleads Sam sagely during a jam session with her father, which he swats down as a smokescreen for her daughter’s anxiety about her own feelings in the lyrics. Practically every time that Frank’s friend Dave at the bar Or this conversation between Rose and Sam in Sam’s bedroom one evening:
“You have to be brave before you can be good.”
“What’s that from?”
“I read it in a comic book.”
One of the themes of conversation seems to be the unarticulated anxiety about the subjectivity of art, especially when it is critiqued by the ones we love. There are at least three instances when a song performed on or off camera is reviewed by a lover or a family member and the positive response is questioned because of the compromised position in which the audience finds itself.
Maybe because of this anxiety, much of the struggle of the film has to do with the desire for and coping with movement away from family. “What if I stayed?” asks Sam toward the end. “I’m glad we’re still friends,” Frank shouts at the slammed door after having berated his love interest Leslie and landlord (played by the luminous Toni Colette, who is not Frances McDormand) late one night on her doorstep. HBL is not concerned with end states. It has no patience for shipping. Instead, its gaze falls on what my older brother called “fly on the wall” scenes: Frank and Sam talking on the couch after a violated curfew, a kiss at a karaoke bar that’s given without thinking and hardly ever reflected upon later. Speaking of which, it’s nice to see that Toni Colette made it out of Hereditary with a sense of humor and a set of pipes. Her cover of Chairlift’s Bruises is really fun. HBL lingers in the space between decisions, at times without musical backing of any sort, counter-intuitively enough, which sometimes works and sometimes feels unpolished.
My mom, who is not a fan of movies in general and usually would rather be doing anything else, turned to me after fifteen minutes and called Sam “captivating”. She thought that the film dragged toward the build up of the close. Mom was grateful there was no saccharine confrontation about the mom’s dementia, no speaking to the dead wife/mother in a tearful monologue, which I thought was a great counterfactual that Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot might have taken a lesson from. The trend of teen movies with minimal parent-child friction is really interesting and welcome to me: Blockers, Flower, Love, Simon, and HBL all take from the premise that movie parents have learned from the movie parents of the past. HBL especially subscribes to the idea of parents and children learning to grow up together.
All in all, some great performances by the leads, great supporting actors, Ted Danson and Toni Colette pulling overtime for this one. This is not the balm that soothes the heart burn of this summer’s slim pickings, but if your expectations are set extremely low and you are in a position to not have to pay for your own tickets, Hearts Beat Loud may rise above your expectations. Probably the crowning achievement of this film is Ron Swanson’s attempt at convincing us he isn’t a perpetually crotchety lumberjack, which he almost but not quite lands. Nice try, old man.
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