Tom Harper (2018)
In Wild Rose, Jessie Buckley plays the ambitious young heroine and Julie Walters plays her mother. It’s an apt pairing, especially since Buckley, by common critical consent, delivers a star-making performance – as Walters did, around thirty-five years ago, as the ambitious young heroine of Educating Rita. What’s more, Buckley in Tom Harper’s film reminded me of Walters in Lewis Gilbert’s – she’s likeable, resourceful, accomplished. Walters went on to better things, to put it mildly, and Buckley may well follow suit. She’s a fine singer and I can’t really fault her playing of Glaswegian firebrand Rose-Lynn Harlan except that it has something else in common with Walters’s playing of Liverpudlian Rita: it’s a bit safe and the effect is to make the character a bit safe too. More of an issue in this case because the protagonist is not a hairdresser eager to study for an OU degree: Rose-Lynn has just done time in prison and is hellbent on becoming a star in the Mecca of country music. Jessie Buckley’s interpretation of her is far from tame yet I never believed in the epithet of the film’s title. Her work in Michael Pearce’s Beast (2017), in a less showy role, was more exciting.
Rose-Lynn does eventually make it to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville though she doesn’t perform to an audience there: she’s only recently arrived in America, hasn’t yet made any contacts with people who might help her career and is one of a party on a guided tour of the famous theatre. She leaves the rest of the party, wanders onto the stage and, accompanied by a couple of obliging musicians, delivers Wynonna Judd’s ‘When I Reach the Place I’m Going’. On arrival at this destination, Rose-Lynn experiences an epiphany. She realises she belongs to Glasgow and her first responsibility is to her two young children, Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) and Lyle (Adam Mitchell), who, until now, have taken second place to her career ambitions. Rose-Lynn returns to Scotland. Back at Glasgow’s own Grand Ole Opry, where she’s been performing since she was a kid, she sings to a packed house a rousing last number – ‘Glasgow (There’s No Place Like Home)’.
The film has been praised as an intelligently successful reworking of a traditional talented-underdog’s-progress tale into something more credible than usual, as well as up to date. The screenplay by Nicole Taylor (best known for the lauded TV mini-series Three Girls, which I’ve not seen) is certainly nimble in the way it keeps avoiding key questions in order to keep the audience on Rose-Lynn’s side. (How do solemn, precociously grown-up Wynonna and sparky Lyle react when she leaves them again to go to Nashville? What does her stern but steadfast mother Marion – who in due course tells her daughter ‘I wanted you to take responsibility – I never meant to take away your hope’ and whose life savings pay for the expedition stateside – have to say when she comes back so soon?) But the story’s conclusion confirms the contrivance of its basic premise. Rose-Lynn seems to have a fantasy of country music stardom that belongs to a smalltown girl of the pre-internet world. Present-day Glasgow can’t be many people’s idea of a live-music backwater. Of course she might still have dreams of something bigger than local gigs but the all-or-nothing, Nashville-or-bust set-up is unconvincingly antique. It’s eventually exposed as a device to send Rose-Lynn on a transatlantic journey that reveals to her what was staring her in the face from the start.
A ‘journey’ is also something that every TV talent and reality show contestant is obliged to go on. When Rose first comes out of jail (she committed some kind of drugs-related offence), her exasperated mother is dismayed to learn that her daughter still has her heart set on becoming famous. ‘There’s no shortage of folk who can sing’, she warns Rose-Lynn: the proof is there, according to Marion, whenever you turn on the television. The people behind Wild Rose may regard things like The X-Factor and The Voice as infra dig but it would be good at least to know why the heroine does too. After all, there are record deals to be had from going all the way on the journey and Rose-Lynn has, as well as vocal gifts, a backstory with legs – ex-con single parent trying to make her kids proud. The omission is all the harder to ignore with Jessie Buckley, late of I’d Do Anything, in the lead role.
Genre tropes – a euphemism for clichés – aren’t thin on the ground. After he’s persuaded a judge that she need no longer be electronically tagged, Rose-Lynn drags her apparently square solicitor (Kern Falconer) along to one of her local shows: he’s soon grooving with the best of them! She gets a cleaning job with well-off Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), who uses her ‘contacts’ to get a tape of Rose-Lynn’s singing sent to (Whispering) Bob Harris. He’s reportedly impressed and wants to meet her. Fairy godmother Susannah buys Rose-Lynn a train ticket to London; they dash onto the platform at Glasgow Central in – needless to say – the nick of time. At first, Rose-Lynn reacts to her seat in a first-class carriage as if Virgin Trains were the Orient Express but she’s soon drinking in the buffet bar with some lads from standard class. When the train arrives in London, her handbag is nowhere to be seen. The implication that she’s paying the price for leaving her first-class seat to mix with hoi polloi is rather startling.
Rose-Lynn has never been in London before but asking directions from a man at Euston Station is as much as she needs to run all the way from there to BBC Broadcasting House. (Jessie Buckley does run very well.) I wasn’t clear how she got herself back to Glasgow empty-handed: maybe Bob Harris, who appears in a cameo as himself, paid her fare. When she tells him, ‘I should have been born in America – I’m an American!’, Harris assures Rose-Lynn that a Glasgow country singer is not a contradiction in terms but she’s too starstruck to take any notice. I didn’t spot him in the audience for her ‘No Place Like Home’ climax but Harris was probably among them. As per the requirements of a feelgood finale in this kind of piece, just about everyone else who’s-been-there-for-her in the course of the story is now looking on happily: Marion, Rose-Lynn’s kids, Susannah, her kids (Nicole Kerr and Ryan Kerr), and so on.
One person conspicuous by his absence at the finale is Susannah’s husband Sam (Jamie Sives). I have to admit I became more interested in the film’s treatment of this couple than in Rose-Lynn’s predictable breakthroughs and setbacks – a treatment that’s revealing of Tom Harper and Nicole Taylor’s mostly right-on approach. Susannah keeps encouraging Rose-Lynn to Go For It – ‘You’re young, you’re incredibly talented, there is nothing you can’t do’ is pretty typical of her advice. She does this because she’s (a) a nice person and, as she approaches her fiftieth birthday, (b) a disappointed one, in spite of her two lovely children. She seems to want to create a new purpose in life by proxy, enabling Rose-Lynn to realise her potential. The fly in the ointment of their mutually helpful relationship is that Rose-Lynn hasn’t told Susannah she has two kids of her own.
The reasons for Susannah’s disappointment aren’t exactly probed; the fact that she’s married to Sam is meant to be enough. He’s a self-made businessman, born and raised in the same rough area as Rose-Lynn. He comes home one day while she’s still there with Susannah: you can tell from this first appearance and the way he looks at Rose-Lynn that Sam is a nasty piece of work but his malignity doesn’t emerge until the eve of his wife’s fiftieth birthday party, where Rose-Lynn is to perform a set and the rich guests will be asked to put their hands in their pockets to help launch her career in the big time. Sam offers, indeed insists, on giving Rose-Lynn a lift home. When he stops his car en route, the two viewers next to me in NFT2 murmured anxiously – even before Rose-Lynn asks Sam if ‘this is the one where you stick it to the cleaning woman’. He replies, ‘No, this is the one where I tell you that I’m on to you’. He explains that he knows about her background and her kids. (Don’t ask how he knows – Rose-Lynn doesn’t.)
This part of Wild Rose, in terms of both plotting and casting, is a fascinating illustration of the relative weight of different strands of right-on thinking, and of the negative prejudices that can attach to it. Imagine how the subplot would play out if the actress playing Susannah were white and the actor playing Sam black, instead of the other way round. Posh, wealthy Susannah would be exposed immediately as a deluded twit; the film – problematically, I think – uses her ethnicity in effect to disguise her foolishness. Both the murmur beside me in the cinema and Rose-Lynn’s remark about sticking it to her anticipated that Sam was ready to make a pass. A BFI audience would rightly have found it outrageous if Sam had been a black local boy made good and it was implied, even wrongly implied, that he was an arrogant sexual predator.
Presumably Sam once had, as Rose-Lynn now has, a dream of bigger things than his socio-economic start in life promised but he’s given no credit for making his dream come true. It’s striking how much automatic discrimination against white working-class men film-makers can get away with. The Scottish males in Wild Rose are either sinister, like Sam; or laughable, like Alan, Rose-Lynn’s talentless bête noire on the local country singing circuit (Craig Parkinson is wasted in the part); or borderline inane, like her ex-partner Elliott (James Harkness). Not to mention those no-good football-supporter types in the Virgin buffet bar… Sam finally seems to disappoint by not being a complete bastard. When Rose-Lynn can’t go through with her performance at the birthday party and confesses that she too is a mother, Susannah appears to blame her husband as a kind of spoilsport. The film loses interest in the couple from this point on: Susannah reappears only in the closing celebration and Sam never again.
I realise it’s an odd note on Wild Rose that majors on these minor characters and says little about Jessie Buckley’s Rose-Lynn on stage but I can’t think of much to say. She sings very well, though I didn’t much like what she sang. (When someone describes her as doing ‘country and western’, Rose-Lynn sharply corrects them: it’s country, not western. Maybe I’d have preferred C&W.) At first, Julie Walters seems odd casting for Marion, but she’s increasingly impressive. Although the script’s phased revelation of Marion’s more loving side is mechanical, Walters gets inside the skin and the head of this worried, tired, determined woman, who’s spent many years working in a bakery as well as running a home. I believed Walters’s lack of tears throughout, even in the supposedly tear-jerking finale. I’ve rarely been a fan of Sophie Okonedo but she’s witty and touching as Susannah (as she was witty and eccentric in the television drama Chimerica, which I saw a few days before this film). Like several thousand other actors, Jamie Sives is described on Wikipedia as ‘best known for his portrayal of […] in Game of Thrones‘ – unless, that is, like me and about three other people in the world, you’ve never watched Game of Thrones. Sives is a strong presence in his thankless role here – someone I’d look forward to seeing in a better one.
There’s a lot of critical goodwill for this film. Some of it derives from authentic enthusiasm for Jessie Buckley’s talents, which I share, though not so much through having seen her play Rose-Lynn. The goodwill is also down, though, to a conviction that the material has politically sound credentials – kick-ass female protagonist from the wrong side of the tracks, etc. I can understand why plenty of people will enjoy Wild Rose more than I did but the determination to admire it seriously has generated some laughable rave reviews, like Nikki Baughan’s in Sight & Sound (May 2019):
‘Cinematography, from regular Harper collaborator George Steel, is … impressive, and expressive. Glasgow is painted in washed-out greys, while Rose-Lynn’s home is shadowy and oppressive; by total contrast, the moments when she sings are bright with colour, a sense of freedom and optimism filling the frame …’
In other words, the visual scheme is just what you’d expect: fair enough, but absurd to applaud it as an imaginative feat. Nikki Baughan was evidently too dazzled by the cinematography to notice much else. She thinks Tom Harper ‘avoids any hint of genre cliché’.
24 April 2019
