Jonathan Demme (2015)
Ricki and the Flash are a rock band, with a regular evening spot in a small Los Angeles bar. They’re very popular there but lead singer Ricki (Meryl Streep) still needs, in order to make ends meet, to work by day as a supermarket cashier. Years ago, Ricki – real name Linda – had ambitions to be a big-time rock star (she plays guitar as well as singing): she walked out on her husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and their three children, to further her career. Pete remarried some time back but his new wife Maureen (Audra McDonald) is away and Ricki gets a call from him: their daughter Julie’s husband has been cheating on her and Julie (Mamie Gummer) has attempted suicide. Ricki flies back to the family home in Indianapolis. Jonathan Demme’s new film is rightly named because the band’s numbers – even though I don’t like their kind of music – are its strength. Their opening routines are promising; by the time she eventually comes back to LA after her stay with Pete and Julie, I was desperate for more from Ricki and the Flash.
The intervening return to Indianapolis – which the heroine, in spite of her long estrangement from her daughter and being broke, undertakes without a moment’s thought – is poor stuff: Ricki’s family are so tedious that you understand why she abandoned them. Diablo Cody’s screenplay is disappointing. Julie, not unreasonably hostile when Ricki first reappears, capitulates too easily to her mother’s spunk and humour; Audra McDonald plays Maureen with authority but the showdown between her and Ricki is purely functional in exposing the latter’s feelings of guilt and regret. (The best part of the scene comes when Maureen exits and Meryl Streep cries quietly in the bathroom.) It’s hard to see how Ricki-Linda and the stuffed shirt Pete ever got together: there’s one moment, after he’s smoked some pot, when Kevin Kline is able to hint at something they might once have had in common, under the layers of difference that the years have grown, but he isn’t given the opportunity to show more. And Diablo Cody’s characterisation of Ricki as right wing is very shallow. (She voted for Bush, loathes Obama, that’s about it.)
The film looks up in its second half chiefly because Meryl Streep, once Ricki’s back on stage in Los Angeles, can sing not only with gusto but also in character: without the song choices becoming too obviously linked to Ricki’s offstage life, Streep invests the numbers with emotions that draw on the character’s feelings about her daughter – and about Greg (Rick Springfield), the Flash’s lead guitarist, who’s in love with Ricki. (This relationship is kept under wraps until it needs to become more central.) Although there are others in the cast with whom she goes back much further (Mamie Gummer is her eldest daughter and Kevin Kline co-starred in Sophie’s Choice), the best connection in the film is between Streep and Rick Springfield’s Greg – onstage and off. Springfield, who is relaxed and likeable, has acted before but not that much: Meryl Streep plays her scenes with him sensitively, as if taking care not to overpower him. She’s developed a good, husky voice for this role and it’s impressively absorbed: Ricki’s vocal tones when she speaks are coherent with her singing voice and credibly suggest the wear and tear of a difficult, disappointed life. Streep is funny too in the couple of short scenes of Ricki working at the checkout. (This is the first film, by the way, that she’s made without Roy Helland doing her hair and make-up since before Sophie’s Choice. He is back for Suffragette.)
As you’d expect from the director of Stop Making Sense (etc), Jonathan Demme is good at staging the rock numbers. Demme also did a fine job with a wedding in Rachel Getting Married but the matrimonial climax to Ricki and the Flash – the marriage of one of Ricki’s sons – is a very mixed bag. Greg persuades Ricki to accept Maureen’s olive-branch invitation to the event and sells his guitar to finance this second journey to Indianapolis. There are moments at the wedding that are well observed but the guests stare at the outsiders Ricki and Greg too emphatically, and the finale isn’t pretty. Ricki’s unconventional present to her son and his bride is – to the initial consternation of the gathering – to take to the stage and perform with Greg and the rest of the Flash (who suddenly emerge). This might have been effective if, after doing the one song, Ricki had quietly taken her leave but just the opposite happens. I couldn’t stop thinking how awful it must be to get married and have someone, even Meryl Streep, ruin your painstaking preparations. When all the proper, snobby guests start grooving to the music, the free-for-all brings Ricki and the Flash perilously close to the finale of Mamma Mia!
16 September 2015
