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Granting Hugh your time

A dim prospect proves surprisingly engaging
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 14th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
June, swoon, croon. Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant manage to make music.
What could be more depressing than the prospect of sitting through another Hugh Grant vehicle? If you’ve seen one Hugh Grant film, you’ve really seen them all. The actor might be trussed-up in Regency garb or hired to impersonate a prime minister, but the performance style is unfailingly the same: There’s the ingratiating, shrugged posture as a modest apology for his handsomeness, and that Cheshire cat smile, a crescent under two cold, strangely vacant eyes — it’s like finding a Doberman staring out of a golden retriever’s head.
Then there are the performative tricks: The studied public-schoolboy stutter and the slight spasm of his body that greets each piece of dialogue directed at him as if it were an unanticipated spitwad.
Music and Lyrics

Directed by Marc Lawrence
With Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore, Campbell Scott and Kristen Johnston

The only thing that could possibly be less endurable than a Hugh Grant film would be a Hugh Grant film co-starring Drew Barrymore. Music and Lyrics should, therefore, by the law of diminishing returns, be a nightmare in four reels. Instead, it’s a surprisingly entertaining trifle.
The film starts with a bang, or rather a Pop! With a surge of synth and a beat-box thump, the screen is filled with an ’80s music video, the type that crowded MTV in its primitive years. It’s a bizarre candy-floss world where a group named Pop! (read Wham!) has successfully married the New Wave with bubblegum. The Pop! duo of Alex Fletcher (Grant) and Colin Thompson (Scott Porter) dance their way through their ditty “Pop Goes My Heart,” decked in Deco-angled jackets and sporting Flock of Seagulls shocks of hair. What makes this sendup work is its dead-earnestness. Director Marc Lawrence has effectively captured the era.
Flash-forward to the present day: While Colin has become the team’s George Michael, Alex has slipped into being the Andrew Ridgeley. A good month will find him with a gig at Knott’s Berry Farm, though things look up momentarily when a Fox program, Battle of the ’80s Has-Beens, tries to lure him on the show. He’s pleased until he finds out that the “battle” will be boxing. He might be able to hold his own against Adam Ant, but Debbie Gibson?
Alex’s agent, Chris (an excellent Brad Garrett), gets him a gig writing a hit song for the current pre-queen of pop music, Cora Corman (Haley Bennett), a pre-Antichrist Britney, who has found a way of introducing orgasmic thrashing and Buddhist tenets into her own videos.
Alex has never trusted himself as a lyricist, and so casts about for a partner. He accidentally discovers one in the woman who comes to water his plants, Sophie Fisher (Barrymore). They make an unlikely song team (she's a prize neurotic, he’s devil-may-care), but then, so did Rodgers and Hart.
Music and Lyrics is comedy and romance, and Grant and Barrymore are up for both. Grant is Grant, but he plays Alex with the odd wince of middle-aged pain — easily winded and arthritic, especially after he bounces off whatever miniature stage will support him before his adoring, if dwindling, fans. Barrymore has truly never been better. Her Sophie is a smart, warm kook of the Goldie Hawn variety a la Cactus Flower. Of the royal Barrymores, only John had a sense of comic timing. Drew is definitely his granddaughter.
The film also has a fine supporting cast. Campbell Scott plays Sophie’s former literary mentor and would-be lover who cannibalizes Sophie’s life in a best-selling novel. That wry Amazon, Kristen Johnston, pops up in a hilarious role as Sophie’s older sister. And Bennett, as the over-sexed sylph Cora, is very funny, underplaying such lines as, “Let me show you the roof. It’s upstairs.”
Director Lawrence’s script is not without faults. Music and Lyrics is Boy-Meets-Girl, and so a certain premeditated gimmickry is expected. The pair’s breakup is forced, as is the inevitable reunion scene. In fact, the last quarter of the film loses much steam through its adherence to formula.
Yet, up to then, Lawrence’s script has enough wit and his cast enough conviviality to help excuse the film’s eventual predictability. Simply put, this is frothy, if forgettable, entertainment, and occasionally that’s enough. Even if Hugh Grant is in it.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (14/03/2007):

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