About a week ago, Wife was lamenting the fact that we’ve abruptly hit the bottom of the summer movie well, with no interest in seeing Child’s Play and too much self-respect to see Men In Black: International, and no theaters that are featuring her anticipated The Farewell, and then she found this playing up in Palo Alto. We’ve been going there for a few weeks in a row because of our new obsession with the Salt and Straw which she was previously acquainted with in Portland, and we really like the theater downtown, and it was the only place showing Wild Rose, so it seemed like a nice night to send her off before her business trip. It’s also got a nice symmetry to it for anyone who’s been following these reviews since the beginning, because one of our very first reviews from last year around this time was Beast, Jessie Buckley’s debut on the silver screen. Wild Rose is Buckley’s sophomore film–matching nicely with compatriot Florence Pugh this year–and it has lots going for it.
This is the way that Wife set up the film for me: I think it’s about a young woman who’s a single mother (but not so single because she seems to be getting some help from her mother) from Scotland who wants to abandon her family in order to pursue a career in country singing in America. Sold. At that time I wasn’t even aware that Buckley was the star, but by that time the absurdity of that premise and the prospect of seeing a film about America from the outside in was all I needed.
There seems to be a bit of serendipity about the timing of this film alongside another English indie film featuring a Pakistani immigrant who’s discovered the music of Bruce Springsteen, “Blinded By the Light.” I think these types of outsider films about America have a lot of appeal because they have a way of describing the positive aspects of American culture at a fraught time in our politics without appearing like a Pollyanna.
After seeing a bad movie about gators yesterday (Crawl), I’ve been thinking about the way that movies can unlock the mystery of places that don’t get a lot of time on screen in Hollywood. In the trailer for the upcoming Hunt movie, it feels like a film that flirts a little too much with some fucked up conspiracy theories about “the Global Elite” to create the premise for a film about a man-hunt. The thick Southern accents sound fresh and welcome, but it’s a little grating to hear them only in the context of a low-budget Blumhouse movie that seems a little bit like fantasy-fulfillment for a bunch of racist internet trolls.
Wild Rose goes about representing under-represented parts of America by creating a compelling “trans-national” character, one that in the hands of a less sensitive and thoughtful director and actor might have come off as quirky and magical, but here does nothing of the sort. The film makes no effort to make Rose-Lynn sympathetic for the first two thirds of the film, Wife and I agreed, and then in that last act, it dares you not to like her. It’s kind of ambitious how far out of its way the film is willing to go for you to resent her delinquency, her effortless lying.
Meanwhile, the music of this film is an exquisite mix of covers by Buckley and thoughtfully chosen songs from the country canon. The one line from an improvised song she sings early on in the film rang in my ears for days afterwards: “Every good thing that ever happens, happens from the inside out.” (Feels a little bit like a line you’d hear in Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight series.) The final song Glasgow is a showstopper. The Oz metaphor captures the strain between her professional aspirations, personal desires, and familial obligations in a really powerful way.
Afterwards, Wife said that Buckley had actually got her start in acting by being on a television singing competition-type show, the same sort she blows off as an option in the film in a bit of meta-theater. It shows: I’m not a country music aficionado, so it was hard for me to know at the time of watching whether she was covering most of the film’s soundtrack herself or if we were listening to other women in the country music scene, but the upcoming movie soundtrack is filled with Buckley’s covers, which fills me with joy.
The redemptive makeover that the audience is expecting is never really served. Instead, Rose-Lynn remains an unformed, though more self-aware and mature character. Wild Rose’s depiction of Rose-Lynn does an excellent job of representing a Millennial sense of imposter syndrome through the relentless reminders that Rose-Lynn is ordinary: “Do you play?” a beloved BBC radio cameo by Bob Harris asks, “Do you write?” She answers no and the audience is informed of how hopeless and starry-eyed her dreams are. “You would not believe how many people do that exact thing,” the security guard tells her outside the Grand Opry in Nashville, poking holes in what feels at the time like a heartfelt moment a long time coming.
The delightful weirdness Rose-Lynn’s transnational love affair is in and of itself a reason to see this film. If for no other reason than to learn that there are enclaves of country music in the far reaches of the British Isles, bars that faithfully reconstruct our Americana, and singers who drop their accents to take on ours. The fetishization of America is at first a joyous love letter to Nashville and the country music scene, and even when her actual journey is anything but, it still finds way to represent the charm and depth of feeling of Nashville through her lyrics and the energy of their simulacrum of Nashville back home.
Wife was a little miffed that the solution to Rose-Lynn’s problem was through money even if the source was different than anticipated. I really liked the party plot line and it’s twist.
If you are similarly in the desert of films this summer, one of the rare movie-goers who has been saving yourself for something other than MIB, then check Wild Rose out.
UPDATE (AUG 10): We called it! That movie, The Hunt, that we discussed way back when was just unplugged from its release next month. (Jan 22, 2020: More, since the Oscar snub on some of that amazing music.)
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