A film
review by Casey Broadwater for blu-ray.com on Nov. 3, 2010.
Hollywood
insiders called it The Sound of Money
when it started raking in loads of box office cash. Leading man Christopher Plummer, thinking it was
too sentimental, referred to it as The
Sound of Mucus. Influential film critic Pauline Kael even deemed it a sugar-coated lie that some people seem to
want to eat. But let's set the cynicism aside for a moment. It may be
syrupy, and it's definitely a Hollywood cash cow - even now, 45 years after its
release - but has there ever been a film more sincerely joyful, more wide-eyed
and earnestly optimistic than The Sound
of Music? (If there has, I haven't seen it.) It's easy to be wary about unbridled
hope, but this movie musical - the eighth and final collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the greatest
composer/lyricist duo of the 20th century - comes by it honestly. There's no
pandering here, no wink-wink irony, no sense of kitsch or camp. The Sound of Music genuinely believes in
the possibilities of love, the certainty of good's triumph over evil, and the
redeeming, transcendent power of song. Critics can scoff and cynics cringe, but
there's a reason audiences world-over have been singing along with the film
since 1965.
The
based-on-a-true-story is almost universally familiar by now. Broadway star Julie Andrews plays Maria, a
good-natured but troublemaking postulant at a convent in the Austrian Alps.
Perhaps troublemaking is an overstatement.
In the song Maria, sung by her
wimple-wearing supervisors, we learn that Maria's main offenses are waltzing on
the way to Mass, whistling on the stair, and - gasp! - singing in the abbey.
Knowing that she's A flibbertigibbet! A
will-o'-the-wisp! A clown! and perhaps too flighty to become a proper nun,
the Mother Abbess (Peggy Wood) puts
Maria on probation and sends her to Salzburg to serve as the governess of the
seven von Trapp children, aged five to sixteen. Their father, Georg
(Christopher Plummer), is a widower and former Navy captain, a hardcore
disciplinarian who orders his kids around with the aid of an impossibly shrill
whistle. Maria, of course, takes a different tact, winning the children over
with song, sewing play clothes out of old drapes, climbing trees, going on
mountaintop picnics, and putting on puppet shows. The captain's heart is slowly
opened when he sees the change in his children, and he breaks off his
engagement with the coldly shrewd Baroness Schraeder (Eleanor Parker) to marry Maria. Alas, there's trouble in paradise.
These are the last golden days of Austria in the 1930s, and the Nazi threat
looms over the Alps like a thundercloud. Don't worry, though, this is The Sound of Music, not Schindler's List, and despite a tense
climax that finds the von Trapps hiding from SS foot soldiers in the abbey cemetery,
the dénouement is pure - literal and figurative - escapism.
Every
junction, twist, and turn of the plot is accompanied by song, and the musical
numbers are so memorably infectious, there ought to be an auditory branch of
the Centers for Disease Control working around the clock on an antidote for the
inevitable ailment of getting these tunes stuck permanently in your head.
Nearly every song has since become a bonafide classic, from the title track - which
finds Maria, arms outstretched, spinning in euphoria - to Climb Every Mountain, the inspiration closer. In between, there's My Favorite Things, an ode to joyful
list-making, Do-Re-Mi, a veritable
music lesson, and The Lonely Goatherd,
a lyrical tongue twister if there ever was one. And let's not forget the fact
that most people think Edelweiss is
an actual Austrian folk song, and not a brilliant creation of Rodgers and
Hammerstein. There's an air of abject wholesomeness that pervades all of the music
- which led Pauline Kael to controversially say, we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear
ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs - but delve into the
subtext of Hammerstein's lyrics and you'll find slight shades of passion, and
even sex, as when eldest daughter Liesl (Charmian
Carr) sings, I am sixteen, going on
seventeen, innocent as a rose. Since when were the delicate, sensual petals
of a rose considered innocent? Still, this is family-friendly stuff all around,
and while it may be overly sweet, I don't think it's fair to say it's
sickeningly so. Not every film needs to be a gritty, philosophically loaded,
emotionally exhausting drama.
The Sound of Music is, at the very least, well-made
fluff, but it's frequently much more than that. The film is exhilarating from
the first frames, as Director Robert
Wise takes us on an aerial tour of the Alps, culminating in a helicopter
shot that swoops down on a twirling Julie Andrews right as she erupts into
song. Wise has a keen sense of mise-en-scène, and all of his compositions
emphasize depth and movement, particularly his arrangements of the seven von
Trapp children. The kids themselves come across as precocious, but never
obnoxious, and when Christopher Plummer's steely eyes soften at the sound of
their singing, even the most hardened moviegoer is likely to break into an
insuppressible smile or even shed a tear. The movie is essentially engineered
to make you feel good, to make your heart swell, and whether or not you think
this is manipulative or superficial, it's certainly effective. I can think of
few better cures for the blues than spending 174 minutes with The Sound of Music. Yes, at nearly three
hours long - thanks to reprises of just about every song - the film would seem
to run the risk of sagging in the middle, but it surprisingly never does,
floating along instead on its own glee-filled effervescence. And the source of
this bubbly propulsion is Julie Andrews, who practically radiates joy and
goodness. It's easy, maybe even fashionable among critics, to dislike The Sound of Music, but we could all
stand to be a little bit more like Maria, waltzing, whistling, and singing our
way through life.
Labels:
biography, Cinderella-story, drama, Eleanor Parker, family, musical, romance
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