Same Old Song

Drew Barrymore hits the high notes in an underwritten ditty.

by Sam Adams

Sometimes it takes a lousy movie to prove an actor's greatness. Anyone can look good in a masterpiece, but it takes real skill to single-handedly pull a movie out of the breach. There were many moments during Marc Lawrence's vague, shapeless Music and Lyrics when I was ready to pull the rip cord, but time and again, something Drew Barrymore did kept pulling me in: a flawless thrown-away gesture, a pleasingly nutty bit of business, a simple moment invested with more feeling than the movie ever deserves. Its climax is a typically overblown and miscalculated spectacle, but a single closeup of Barrymore's teary, wide-open face redeems everything that's come before. Well, almost everything. Redeeming all of the movie's missteps is a tall order, one no amount of winsome pratfalling can fill.

Starring in imperfect movies seems to be what Barrymore does best; it is, indisputably, what she does most. Her filmography is a case study in low expectations and squandered potential, in large part because the comic romances she favors have fallen so markedly into disrepair. The genre has become so formulaic, so divorced from reality, that its essential optimism has been replaced by calculated cynicism. The characters end up together not because we want them to, but because the playbook demands it.

You can tell from the outset that Music and Lyrics is going to be an undercooked mess. The movie opens with what ought to be a slam-dunk: an '80s music-video parody featuring Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) and the other members of a synth-pop band called PoP shaking their hips in front of Op-Art backdrops, their elaborately crafted hairdos bouncing to the beat. It's hard to think of a broader or more obvious target, but Lawrence still manages to miss the mark, in part because his parodic version of '80s cheese lacks the era's threadbare innocence. (Watch VH1 Classic some day and marvel at how even the clips for best-selling bands look as if they were produced by film students in an abandoned loft.) Like so many things in Music and Lyrics, it's gussied up reflexively, with no thought as to how such knee-jerk "production value" might unbalance the movie as a whole.

DIFFERENT KEYS: Drew Barrymore waxes lyrical to Hugh Grant. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Two decades later, Alex is a washed-up pop star, belting out his old hits at state fairs and class reunions while his former partner in PoP enjoys a thriving career in music and film. (Any resemblance between Alex Fletcher and Andrew Ridgeley — aka the "other guy" in Wham! — is no doubt intentional.) You'd expect him to be bitter, but Alex is a self-proclaimed "happy has-been." Although Alex secretly covets another shot at the brass ring, Grant plays him with his patented, and by now ossified, brand of rapid-fire devil-may-careism, ripping through Lawrence's semi-bons mots at championship speed. To be sure, no one clips his consonants quite like Grant, but he's so engaged in playing Alex's self-satisfied surface that he neglects to give him any inner life. He's pure genre stock, right down to the moment he poses postcoitally on his balcony clad in only a pair of blue jeans, the morning sun glinting off his freshly waxed chest.

By contrast, Barrymore's Sophie Fisher is a mess, and quite deliberately so. A hypochondriac chatterbox with two left feet, she stumbles into Alex's apartment just as he's gotten his first comeback shot in years: a chance to write a hit song for teenage pop star Cora Corman (Haley Bennett). As Alex mulls over chords on the piano, Sophie spontaneously starts spouting rhyming couplets, and an uneasy songwriting partnership is born.

Loaded up with enough baggage for a family of four, Sophie is a cross between a modern neurotic and the screwball archetype of the woman who's too busy tripping over herself to notice what a knockout she is. There's a lovely moment when she and Alex are pulling one of several all-nighters to churn out a song in time for Cora's deadline, and Barrymore rattles off a speech at top velocity while slopping coffee into two cups, moving the pot back and forth without lifting it as if even lifting the pot between pours would pose an unforgivable distraction. Especially when compared to Grant's unmodulated shtick, Barrymore feels unerringly natural and unforced — which, unfortunately, is true of very little else in the movie.

The only other great performance in Music and Lyrics isn't onscreen: It's by Adam Schlesinger, who composed many of the movie's ersatz pop songs. In the end, it's an anti-pop movie, prizing the "sincerity" of Sophie and Alex's piano-based ballads over Cora's libidinous dance music. But Schlesinger, the ace pop craftsman behind Ivy and Fountains of Wayne, does his idioms proud, crafting devilishly catchy productions that flawlessly nail their chosen styles. The movie's barn-broad attempts at pop satire unfailingly miss their targets, but Schlesinger hits his every time.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Music and Lyrics

Written and directed by Marc Lawrence

A Warner Bros. release