Songcatcher

The Appalachian music that propels Songcatcher sounds sweet as honey, but the non-musical aspects of this independent film smell an awful lot like pork product. Songcatcher is as hammy as they come, its characters laden with a “golly-gee” sensibility and facial theatrics more befitting a vaudeville act. Janet McTeer plays Dr. Lily Penleric, a doctor of musicology teaching at a turn-of-the-century East Coast institute. Fed up with the glass ceiling her Gibson-girl head keeps smacking into, Lily heads for the hills to visit her sister's fledging grammar school in North Carolina. As fast as you can say “plot contrivance,” Lily hears one of the locals sing an Appalachian ballad and -- wouldn't you know it--- the ballad is a direct descendant of the Scottish-Irish folk tradition (Lily's specialty), and the heretofore unknown Appalachian rendering of these ballads is one doozy of a discovery. Seeing a way to finally advance her career, Lily goes about documenting the Appalachian people's rich musical heritage by way of “catching” their songs. First she pillages the musical memory banks of doe-eyed orphan-waif Deladis Slocumb (Rossum), then she seeks out the wizened yet still feisty Viney Butler (Carroll), who's outfitted with a shotgun at her side and a shotgun mouth to boot, like any self-respecting backwoods-gramma type would. Most of the mountain people are happy to oblige the fancy lady from “the other world.” Viney's scruffy grandson, Tom Bledsoe (Quinn), is the only one grumbling that Lily's work smacks an awful lot like exploitation, a position he advocates in between gulps of moonshine and moody bouts on his gee-tar. But he's singing a different tune once he falls in love with the prickly Lily. Prickly's the word for most of Songcatcher; unless you've got a high tolerance for schmaltz, this naïve and poorly executed film will grate on the nerves like a cheese-shredder. The history of the secluded Appalachian people and their music (performed here by Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent, among others) is fascinating stuff, but it's swallowed whole by Greenwald's liberal, feminist agenda. I don't think it's an unnecessary demand that period films have a reasonably authentic historical context to them; Songcatcher apparently does, however, and insists we buy wholesale its depiction of the mountain-made Tom as an enlightened, Renaissance man. (In addition to thinking the local lesbian couple is cute, he picks a little tune with legendary blues guitarist Taj Mahal, in a scene devised solely to parade out a black man, proof that Tom's a color-blind kinda guy; Mahal subsequently disappears for the remainder of the film.) Just as extremely depicted are the “baddies” - here, a prissed-up local who's been down the mountain to so-called civilization and now aims to steal the mountaineers' land out from under them (all he's missing is a curly-Q mustache to twirl dastardly in order to complete the caricature). It's all infuriatingly simplistic, and the performances help matters little. Quinn and McTeer are wholly uncompelling, even off-putting, as the romantic leads, and most of the locals are condescendingly dumbed-down and grubbed-up. A third-act descent into downright melodrama seals this picture's fate: Buy the soundtrack. Skip the film.