Drake Doremus (2013)

Breathe In opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival:  Drake Doremus, Felicity Jones and Dustin O’Halloran, who wrote the score, were all there for the screening.  It was a really enjoyable occasion – because it was Edinburgh and an opportunity to applaud the people behind Like Crazy – but this latest from Doremus is a disappointment after its predecessor.  Felicity Jones again plays an English girl on a period of study in America; good actress though she is, Jones is less persuasive here than in the earlier film.  More than two years after Like Crazy, she’s playing someone younger – a high school rather than a college student.  It’s true that Jones, who’s now nearly thirty, is petite enough to pass for someone younger and innocent but the naivete of Sophie in Breathe In is wafer thin.   It’s clear almost as soon as she arrives to stay with the Reynolds family in a small town in upstate New York that Sophie has her eye on the paterfamilias Keith (Guy Pearce), a high-school music teacher who’s still not given up hopes of a career as a cellist in an orchestra.   As Jones plays her, there’s no mistaking Sophie’s intent – or, at least, her fantasy – and Keith must see it in her eyes.   Doremus and his actors are good at social details.  When Sophie has her first meal with the Reynolds – Keith, his wife Megan (Amy Ryan) and their teenage daughter Lauren (Mackenzie Davis) – the scene expresses how a newcomer can feel all the more excluded by hosts who are welcoming and whose affability reinforces, to an outsider, their easy familiarity with each other.  For the first half hour or so the central story is strong too.  Their shared interest in, and talent for, performing classical music give Sophie and Keith a kinship that sets them apart from the homebody Megan, with her collection of cookie jars, and Lauren, who’s a swimming champ and, by implication, a philistine.  For as long as it’s not obvious that Sophie’s interest in Keith is reciprocated, the film is absorbing.

Although it’s hardly an original idea, the passion in the music does function as a sublimation of sexual feelings that Sophie and Keith know shouldn’t be expressed – particularly a piece of Chopin that Sophie plays for the rest of the high-school class when Keith asks her to introduce herself to them.  Guy Pearce’s reaction to this is very striking.  Keith seems discomfited by Sophie’s playing:   Pearce suggests this is something he hadn’t bargained for either as a fellow musician (and one who feels thwarted – and vulnerable to younger competitors) or in terms of its emotional effect on him (as someone whose family life is unfulfilling too).  But what follow-up there is to this powerful moment is artificially delayed.  We have to wait until Megan, Lauren and Sophie go to a concert at which Keith is playing and, when they meet him afterwards, he introduces Sophie to his orchestra colleague as a ‘fantastic pianist’.  (This moment plays out simply as a crude exclusion of Lauren.)  As Keith’s and Sophie’s feelings for each other start to register in the real world outside their heads (although it’s not clear that the relationship is ever fully consummated), Breathe In becomes conventional and melodramatic in a rather mechanical way, and the screenplay turns lazy and absent-minded.  Lauren happens to be walking just where she can see her father and Sophie lying together by a lake; the serial humiliations for her that follow aren’t sequenced convincingly – it’s as if all that matters is that they climax in the car crash Lauren’s in.  There’s a lack of clarity too about how much Keith’s professional fortunes matter to him relative to his new preoccupation with Sophie.

Of course Sophie is meant to expose the fissures of family life that routine and evasion have kept hidden but Doremus and his co-writer Ben York Jones (who also worked with him on Like Crazy) supply that family life only with qualities that make it vulnerable.  They fail to suggest enough of what kept it going until now (and there’s no suggestion of earlier ruptures having occurred).  You actually get a better sense – in one short scene – of how an imperfect marriage survives when the Reynolds, with Sophie, visit their friends Peter (Kyle McLachlan) and Wendy (Alexandra Wentworth).  You get it in what Peter confides to Keith over the barbecue, in Wendy’s vivid chatter about interior decorating and freezing food.   Guy Pearce, like Felicity Jones, is good at creating edge and tension but he also makes it too evident too soon what lies beneath the surface.   The film starts and ends with Keith, Megan and Lauren posing for a family photo:  these bookend sequences are very well played (even though by the end we know just how forced the smiles for the camera are) but Keith’s capacity for dissimulation doesn’t go beyond this momentary and obvious example.   Pearce makes him too remote and pissed off.

Amy Ryan has a pretty wretched role – the cookie jars are too obviously symbolic and, of course, get shattered in due course – but Ryan plays it empathically.  You can just about believe in Megan’s jolly determination to hold on to her happy family, or the idea of one.  The moments of credibility that Amy Ryan achieves tend, however, to reveal the implausibility of other elements of Breathe In.  Although she’s been playing piano since she was five years old, Sophie is now undecided about a musical career:  she reveals this to Keith when they’re alone in the house together, after an old-fashioned Hollywood rainstorm that requires a change of clothes, but you know that Megan would have been cheerfully inquisitive enough (and sufficiently effective as an inquisitor) to get this sort of information out of Sophie in less meteorologically heightened circumstances.  (The rainstorm is such a cliché you feel almost surprised that neither of these clever, cultured people comments on it.)

Breathe In, for all its faults, is much better than A Late Quartet but it gradually sinks into the same misapprehension that the classical music context necessarily confers depth on the material, when the effect of the music is, for the most part, merely melodramatic.  And the sexual dimension is disappointingly tame – Felicity Jones’s actual age blurs the potentially controversial generation gap between Keith and Sophie (she is presumably a minor).  By the end, the movie has become so predictable that I hoped Keith would ignore the crucial phone call, informing him that Lauren’s in hospital, and go ahead with eloping with Sophie – just so as to defy the requirements of this kind of story.  (He doesn’t.)  Whereas the music often seems too loud, it’s sometimes hard to make out what the voices are saying – even when everything else about an exchange between characters is telling you that their words are full of significance.

19 June 2013