Recently, I noticed a disturbing trend in films: movies about musicians in which the musicians in the movie do not know that their music is somewhat less than electrifying. And seemingly, neither does anyone else. This first came to my attention with Inside Llewyn Davis. Early in the film, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan deliver an excruciatingly cloying rendition of Five Hundred Miles. This is one of those hokey, faux-rustic ditties that made the early 1960s pure hell for high-school kids, who viewed Peter, Paul and Mary as only slightly less malignant than Ivan the Terrible, Jack the Ripper and Dracula. But nobody in the coffee house where Mulligan and Timberlake harmonise seems to notice that both the song and the singing are excruciating. The audience looks rapt.
Admittedly, Inside Llewyn Davis has certain ambiguous elements. Many, though not all, people who have seen it believe that the Coen brothers were deliberately, and quite mercilessly, ridiculing the early 60s folk scene. The Coens themselves said that they wanted to make a movie where a folk singer gets punched in the face. They got their wish. But lots of people, mostly my addled contemporaries, thought the film was completely sincere and respectful: an homage to catatonia. They even went out and bought the soundtrack, seemingly of their own volition. In the film, only F Murray Abraham, playing a hard-edged nightclub manager, seems aware that folk music, by and large, is a crime against humanity. A heinous crime. He basically tells Llewyn Davis this right to his face. The face that gets punched both at the beginning and the end of the film. Not without justification.
Likewise, Jersey Boys. Audiences are supposed to be inspired by the uplifting lives and the uplifting music of the Four Seasons, just as they were on Broadway. But if you are not a suit or a Jersey Girl or a tourist or 75 years old, the two hours at the movie house may prove baffling, perhaps even painful. That's because, in some quarters, the Four Seasons' music is regarded as the work of Satan. The Rolling Stones were invented to expunge the memory of pop combos like the Four Seasons, just as the Ramones were invented to make people forget that bands like Yes and Genesis ever existed.
Jersey Boys rewrites history. When I was a kid, there was a cultural fault line right down the middle of American society. The Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Animals, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Motown record company and basically everybody were on one side, and precocious lounge lizards like the Four Seasons were on the other. To this day, songs like Walk Like a Man and Can't Take My Eyes Off You give me the willies. But in Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood posits a hermetically sealed universe in which nobody ever tells the neo-reactionary, falsetto boy band that the Brits have arrived, and they've brought power chords with them. Everyone in the movie acts as if the music of the Four Seasons is daring and revolutionary and iconoclastic. Like the Four Seasons are the biggest breakthrough since Mozart. As George Santayana famously put it, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to see Jersey Boys.
That brings us to the exquisitely insipid Begin Again. The film stars the pathologically giggly Keira Knightley as a somewhat pathetic singer/songwriter who breaks up with her scummy singer/songwriter boyfriend (Adam Levine from Maroon 5), but then is rescued from obscurity by a hard-drinking, washed-up record producer, Brand X pater familias and all-purpose uber-loser played with consummate gusto by Mark Ruffalo. What's confusing here is that Knightley's music is supposed to be honest and authentic and unaffected, while her boyfriend's music is supposed to be phony and overproduced and crummy. But the reality is: they both suck. He sounds mopey and generic. She sings in that pouty, breathy, non-committal whine that makes Joni Mitchell sound like Aretha Franklin. Amy Winehouse, she ain't.
There is a scene at the end of Begin Again where Knightley begs her duplicitous, sell-out ex-beau to do her winsome love song in concert just the way she wrote it. And he does, in classic I Am Such a Lonely Boy style, which cheers her immensely. But then halfway through the song he cops out and switches to the cheesy, up-tempo arrangement the record company forced upon him. Keira is so disappointed. She walks out of his life, for ever. But in truth, both versions of the song are equally repellent. In fact, just about all the music in the movie is hideous except for one brief interlude when Frank Sinatra is heard singing Luck Be a Lady. It is never a good idea to have Keira Knightley and Adam Levine sing in the same movie as Frank Sinatra. No good can come of it.
When you make a movie that is not about musicians, you can use everything in the soundtrack from Eminem to Vivaldi to the Bad Seeds to ZZ Top to Miles Davis to the Red Army Choir to Edith Piaf. But when you make a movie about a particular kind of musician, you're basically stuck with that particular kind of music. And, if the music veers toward Megatronic vapidity, you are, I'm afraid, in big trouble.
