Monthly Archives: January 2026

  • Song Sung Blue

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Craig Brewer (2025)

    Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) and Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson) first meet backstage among other tribute acts on the bill for the Wisconsin State Fair.  She’s Patsy Cline.  He’s tired of being Don Ho (Hawaiian pop) and others – his music hero is Neil Diamond.  Mike and Claire join forces to front a Diamond tribute band, Lightning and Thunder.  Lightning Mike is the main vocalist, Thunder Claire alongside him on keyboards and backing vocals; they sometimes duet.  They’re soon local celebrities, performing in and beyond their native Milwaukee.  Even sooner, Mike and Claire fall in love and marry.  She has a son and daughter from her first marriage; Mike’s daughter sometimes pays a visit from Florida (where she lives with her mother); they all get on well together.  Song Sung Blue is pleasant to watch but, after an hour or so, I was wondering how on earth it could keep going for an hour more.  (The film runs 132 minutes.)  Moments later, an out-of-control car ran into Claire and Craig Brewer’s musical drama promptly turned into One Trauma After Another.

    The screen announces at the start that the film is ‘based on a true love story’.  By the end, it’s become so mawkish that you sincerely hope Brewer, who also wrote the screenplay, hasn’t followed the biographical facts too closely.  He hasn’t quite done so (if Wikipedia and Google AI are to be believed).  It’s true that Mike and Claire Sardina were Lightning and Thunder, that the band performed successfully in and on either side of the 1990s, and on one occasion were an opening act for a famous rock group called Pearl Jam (whom I’d never heard of).  It’s also true that Claire lost a leg after being hit by a car in the Sardinas’ front garden and eventually returned to performing wearing a prosthetic limb.  Mike Sardina really was a recovering alcoholic and really did have serious heart problems, which may have caused the fall in which he sustained a fatal head injury in 2006.  I’ve not seen anything, though, to back up the standout melodramatic coincidences in Song Sung Blue.  That, for example, while Claire was in intensive care after the car accident, Mike went into cardiac arrest in an adjacent hospital room, where Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) saved the day with defibrillator paddles.  Or that, moments after Lightning and Thunder’s sold-out, triumphant comeback concert at Milwaukee’s Ritz Theater, Mike died suddenly, in the car taking him and Claire to a nearby venue to meet his idol Neil Diamond for the first time.  The Sardinas’ true story might seem heart-warming/-breaking enough to manage without these tragic contrivances, but Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow (2005), Dolemite Is My Name (2019) etc) clearly thought otherwise.

    Perhaps that was a commercial calculation – was Hugh Jackman’s casting another?  The Sardinas’ story had been the subject of a documentary feature by Greg Kohs, but some time ago, in 2008.  (The documentary, also entitled Song Sung Blue, is much shorter – 85 minutes.)  Jackman’s star standing and success in screen musicals as different as Les Misérables (2012) and that baffling box-office smash The Greatest Showman (2017), must have appealed to the production companies involved.  But Jackman is so wrong for the role – and from the word go.  You don’t need to know how the real Mike Sardina looked (I didn’t) to be sure it wasn’t like this.  Even before Mike cultivates a Neil Diamond big-hairdo, Jackman is obviously made up to simulate someone he’s not.  More important, he’s just not the right type – 6’ 2“ tall, Hugh Jackman isn’t a little guy in the metaphorical sense either.  After returning from service in Vietnam, Mike Sardina worked in Milwaukee as a car mechanic and handyman:  there’s nothing blue-collar about the man playing him.  Bringing to life the glitzy adornments and underdog brio of the tribute acts world – a showbiz bargain basement – is the story’s most promising element, but among the collection of wannabe eccentrics he rubs shoulders with, Jackman is like visiting royalty.  In a bit early on, Mike, alone at home in his shirt and underpants, sings along to ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’; moving too enthusiastically to the music, he falls over, lands on his knee, and yells in pain – comedy pain.  This is Jackman showing himself game for anything, a good sport, yet embarrassing to watch.  (It’s the same feeling I had decades ago, whenever Julie Andrews pretended to have the common touch.)  None of this would matter too much, of course, if Jackman were a more penetrating actor; conscientious as he is, though, he nearly always seems removed from a character.  When Mike bashes his knee, Jackman proficiently goes through the motions of physical vulnerability.  The effect is the same when he tries expressing the emotional kind.

    The other tribute acts are barely even character sketches; they’re used, rather, as an oddball chorus in set pieces like Mike and Claire’s wedding ceremony.  While Lightning and Thunder are out of action, as Claire struggles to come to terms with her disability and the drugs she’s been prescribed, Mike gets work performing at a Thai restaurant whose owner (Shyaporn Theerakulstit) is a big Neil Diamond fan – a cultural anomaly that’s funny in itself, according to Craig Brewer.  The trio playing Mike and Claire’s kids – King Princess and Hudson Hensley, along with Ella Anderson – all do as well as can be expected but Brewer has no time for fleshing out their characters or describing the development of blended-family relationships.  As well as her life-saving scene, Claire’s daughter Rachel is allowed to have an unplanned pregnancy and give birth, but this is just one of the supporting crises in the film’s second half.

    Song Sung Blue’s salvation is Kate Hudson.  She’d only just turned twenty when she appeared in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000), which remains the biggest success of her career to date.  Even though Song Sung Blue probably won’t change that, Hudson is receiving well-deserved plaudits for her work in Craig Brewer’s film.  Unlike her co-star, she seems socially spot-on.  In the early scenes, she’s entirely convincing as a working single mother and hairdresser.  Onstage and offstage, she’s terrifically vivid (which naturally increases the impact of Claire’s depression after the accident).  Perhaps there’s a fusion of Claire’s performing appetite and Hudson’s relishing a part she can get her teeth into; if so, it makes both the character and her interpreter all the more likeable.  Interpreter is certainly the operative word here.  Mike’s reverence for Neil Diamond causes him qualms about impersonating the man.  Claire puts his mind at rest by telling Mike he wouldn’t ‘be an impersonator but an interpreter’, and that’s what Hudson’s Claire comes across as when she sings ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’ at the Wisconsin State Fair.  The story dictates there won’t be many more Patsy Cline numbers in the course of the film:  the only other is ‘Sweet Dreams’, and that’s an abbreviated fantasy in the mind of drugs-addled Claire in the aftermath of her life-changing injuries.  The Neil Diamond songs are nice enough, but Kate Hudson’s performance is so enjoyable, I’m rather sorry the whole film isn’t about a solo Patsy Cline tributary.

    9 January 2026

  • Les cousins

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claude Chabrol (1959)

    Claude Chabrol’s second feature earns its place in BFI’s French New Wave film-makers season as the movement’s first major box-office hit.  (The season paves the way for the British release later this month of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague.)  For New Wave aficionados and/or cognoscenti, Les cousins – story by Chabrol, dialogue by frequent collaborator Paul Gégauff – is probably a valuable illustration of its director’s moral outlook and his visual expression of that outlook.  For those (like me) with an interest in, rather than informed allegiance to, the nouvelle vague, the film’s a bit boring.

    Les cousins has a town-mouse-and-country-mouse set-up.  The two young title characters are hedonistic sophisticate Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy) and anxious, naïve Charles (Gérard Blain).  Paul lives in a Paris apartment owned by his father.  Charles, from a provincial home shared with his adored mother, comes to lodge with Paul in Paris, where both are law students.  Party animal Paul seems never to attend lectures or do any reading.  Charles seldom has his nose out of a book; whenever he’s not writing home to his mother, he’s taking notes.  On a rare break from his studies, at a café where Paul and his friends hang out, Charles meets Florence (Juliette Mayniel).  Dazzled by her beauty and unaware of her promiscuity, he falls in love.

    In this social group, Charles is unusual enough to attract Florence’s interest, but not her exclusive interest.  Due to a misunderstanding, she turns up at the apartment at the wrong time to meet him, when Charles is still at classes.  In his absence, Paul, after persuading Florence that she and his cousin would be incompatible, sleeps with her.  Paul and Florence start living together; Charles, though he carries on swotting, can hardly fail to be aware of their relationship.  Florence has moved out by the time Paul passes a law exam and throws another party to celebrate.  Charles fails the exam and throws his notes and student ID into the Seine.  Back at the apartment, he loads a single bullet into his uncle’s six-chamber revolver (one of several firearms on display in the flat), points the gun at the sleeping Paul, and pulls the trigger.  No more than a click follows and Charles goes to bed.  Next morning, as the cousins talk together, Paul picks up the revolver and playfully points it at Charles, whose urgent warning that the weapon is loaded, is futile.  In the same moment, Paul pulls the trigger, killing him.

    To appreciate the main performances, it must help to have seen Chabrol’s first film, the previous year’s Le beau Serge (not included in the current BFI season), in which Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy also star.  According to Terrence Rafferty, the stories and the casting in the two films are ‘mirror images of each other … In the first film, Blain had the showier role, as a depressive small-town drunk, Brialy the quieter role, as the sympathetic friend and observer’.  Even without knowing Le beau Serge, though, you can recognise that both actors give good performances in Les cousins.  Thanks to Brialy’s sustained verve, Paul is bearable to watch (more than can be said for most of his circle of friends).  Blain, who slightly resembles Dean Stockwell, plays within a narrower range that also makes its mark.  The quality of their characterisations includes intimations that Paul and Charles are more than they appear to be.  Brialy suggests that Paul’s bohemian carelessness is cover for desperate ennui.  Blain gives Charles’ diligent celibacy passive-aggressive undertones.  The film’s closing stages, though shocking at one level, aren’t therefore a complete surprise.

    Photographed in black and white by Henri Decaë and edited by Jacques Gaillard, the film looks and moves well.  The climactic night-into-the-next-morning is particularly compelling to watch.  Yet the eventual fatal ironies, reflecting Chabrol’s avowed admiration for Hitchcock and anticipating the murder stories for which the Frenchman himself would become best known, seem designed chiefly to deliver a big finish, whose impact depends largely on tonal contrast with what has gone before.  And on Richard Wagner, although his music has already been heard in the film, upstaging Paul Misraki’s jazz-influenced original score, and underlining Wagner’s Nazi connotations.  At one of his parties, Paul puts an SS officer’s hat on his head and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on the record player.  (In another scene, he wakes up a Jewish friend (Paul Bisciglia), by shining a flashlight in his eyes and shouting ‘Gestapo!’)  Chabrol’s camera finally moves from Charles’ dead body to the record player, and ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan and Isolde draws Les cousins to a close.  This isn’t a very long film (112 minutes) but it’s too long to be heartlessly entertaining.

    8 January 2026

Posts navigation