August Rush

August Rush

This is a very sentimental movie, but it’s supposed to be. I hate sentimentality when it’s unwarranted, but there is something courageous about the way “August Rush” wears its heart on its sleeve and goes all the way with coincidence, melodrama and skillful tear jerking. I think younger viewers with more innocent tastes may really like it.

The story is an extremely loose modern adaptation of elements from Oliver Twist. We meet Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore), an 11-year old who has run away from his orphanage rather than be placed with a foster family. He has been told his parents are still alive and were musicians, and he believes that through music he can find them again. Do you see what I mean about sentimentality?

Well, as luck would have it, they were musicians. And they met through music. Lyla (Keri Russell) was a cellist in a symphony orchestra under the thumb of her stage door father (William Sadler), who forces her to leave town for career reasons just after she falls in love at first sight with Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an Irish rock singer we see busking in Greenwich Village in one of those flashbacks where people make love so discreetly that they stay well within their PG rating. They promise to meet again; young lovers learn from the movies and always remember: Exchange cell numbers! But before she gets pregnant (or else they wouldn’t be Evan’s parents, now would they?), her father tells her the baby died, and ships Evan to an orphanage.

It turns out Lyla didn’t stop playing cello after all she took up guitar! And so did Louis! Back in the present day or maybe three months ago; director Kirsten Sheridan isn’t telling Evan hears some street musicians in Washington Square Park singing songs that Lyla wrote but hasn’t recorded yet (because if she’d recorded them, then the movie wouldn’t have any new songs to introduce), and he picks up a guitar and, despite having had no training in it whatsoever, starts strumming along. And wouldn’t you know it? He’s a natural! It takes him all of 30 seconds to become a better guitarist than anyone I ever went to college with. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Another young musician (Leon G. Thomas III), who is not called the Artful Dodger but should be, hears Evan and takes him back to an abandoned theater where he and other young lads live under the management of Robin Williams, who plays a character who is called the Wizard but could just as easily be called Fagin. Every day, the Wizard sends his little army out into the streets not as pickpockets or thieves or con men or anything cool like that; nope, they’re buskers.

One day while Evan/August/whoever is on one of his lunch breaks from being a prodigy street musician and this is strictly line of duty busking work, because if he played during business hours then people would have to pay him he comes across a church choir where Terrence Howard is preaching. So of course Terrence Howard turns out according to my notes here to have connections at Juilliard.

So yes: August gets discovered as a child prodigy composer after conducting his own choral piece at Juilliard; becomes New York City’s most beloved unknown phenomenon since Banksy; quickly earns the right to conduct his own symphony at an outdoor concert in Central Park (which in real life would take years of fundraising by hundreds of volunteers); proves himself an expert conductor; saves his mother’s life with music therapy; has dinner with his father at Applebee’s; cures Robin Williams’ addiction problem by throwing away his pills for him (seriously); and gets them both clean, sober and out from under the influence of their long-lost love. And then he gets to go and live with his dad, because what every recovering addict needs is a 12-year old roommate in New York City.

Oh, and did I mention that everyone in this movie is either dead or Irish?

I’m serious, Charles Dickens’ ghost would be cheering his lungs out. This film directed by Kirsten Sheridan and written by Nick Castle, James V. Hart and Paul Castro has a light-hearted way about its devices but doesn’t hold back in using them, in fact it uses all of them and invents some new ones just to use them too. Freddie Highmore (from “Finding Neverland”) is so open and winning that everything August says seems completely sincere one touch of craftiness would sink the whole project.

The other thing is, this movie appears to love music as much as August does. So if you’re going to lay it on this thick you can’t compromise, and Sheridan doesn’t. I don’t have some imaginary barrier in my mind beyond which a movie dare not go. I’d rather “August Rush” went the whole way than just be lukewarm about it. Yes, some older viewers will groan, but I think up to a certain age kids will buy it; imagining their response made me enjoy my own response more.

Watch August Rush For Free On Gomovies.