Another lo-fi fantasy from writer-director John Carney about the life-sustaining power of music-making, Flora and Son centers on the aggressive, impulsive single mother of the title (Eve Hewson) who constantly clashes with her delinquent teen son, Max (Oren Kinlan). Could a discarded guitar she plucks from a garbage bin possibly bring them together? If that sounded snarky, it’s probably because Flora and Son feels more formulaic and less assured than Once and Sing Street, two of Carney’s other attempts to incorporate original songs directly into a film narrative. (You know, like a musical.) It’s not just that the compositions here aren’t as compelling—though Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a YouTube guitar instructor in California who gives Flora lessons, strums his heart out alongside Hewson on “Meet in the Middle,” a lovely ballad he, Hewson, and Carney composed alongside Gary Clark and Robert John Ardiff. It’s more a matter of tone. Seen from one angle, this is a tough story about a struggling family dealing with abuse, economic stress, and the threat of juvenile detention. But the movie wants to play this for comedy. (A strange sequence, in which a bitterly cruel shouting match between Flora and Max concludes with the sight gag of her trying and failing to throw the guitar out their small apartment window, is a case in point.) Hewson (the daughter of U2’s Bono, for what it’s worth) suffers most from the tonal inconsistency. She’s good, but seems held back by being asked to go for corny laughs. A far more serious moment—when she’s listening to a YouTube video of Joni Mitchell performing “Both Sides Now” while doing dishes and is overcome by the way the song seems to be speaking directly to her—suggests a better, more serious movie. If Carney had wanted to dive into the darkness of this drama—and Hewson has the heavy eyelids to do it—he might have enabled her to give a powerhouse performance. This perhaps isn’t the great Flora and Son we might have wanted, but it’s the pretty good one we’ve got.
(9/26/2023)
