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Very Annie Mary is
unpretentious and sincere, and it has Rachel Griffiths as its star, all to its
credit It's also a mess of a film, corny, cliched, and cloying through a good deal
of its over-elaborate plotting and forced humor. It bogs down in its own sentimentality
like flies in molasses. It makes Waking Ned Devine
look like a work of cinema genius.
When Annie Mary was sixteen she won a Welsh singing competition which
granted her a scholarship to study voice in Milan. She had to turn it down because her
mother was dying; then she lost her voice and hasn't sung since.
The movie opens some years later, with Annie Mary living with her
father (Jonathan Pryce) upstairs from his bakery business. He's enamored of opera and his
own voice, a real ham taken to driving his truck around the countryside in a Pavarotti
mask and costume, speakers blaring "Nessun Dorma" for all the village to hear.
He's also vain and self-important and treats his daughter with pure disdain, squelching
any initiative she wishes to take.
Griffiths, a brilliant chameleon of an actress, has recently gained
wide recognition in the HBO series, Six Feet
Under, but she had already won a considerable following amongst movie fans for a
wide range of performances--as the prostitute Bettina in My Son the Fanatic, as Emily Watson's
sister in Hillary
and Jackie, as Dennis Quaid's wife in The Rookie.
As Annie Mary she's remarkable in a sympathetic, but most unflattering role.
Writer/director Sara Sugarman has the thirty-something Annie Mary arrested in
adolescence--awkward, clumsy, wearing awful clothes and an unflattering hairdo. She sneaks
cigarettes, unsuccessfully propositions the only available young man in town (who is about
to go off as a Baptist missionary), and teaches singing when she's not burning the bread
at the bakery.
There's also a sub-plot about her best friend, Bethan, an invalid for
whom the town is busy raising money so that she can go off to Disneyland. A gay couple is
thrown into the hopper for no discernible reason. And it is all interlarded with
occasional songs--invariably sentimental chestnuts or bottom-of-the-barrel disco
("YMCA," for example).
Only when Annie Mary's father suddenly has a stroke does she gain the
independence of mind to make some changes. Then there will be the expected variety of
forays and disappointments before the predictably happy ending. Situations that are
supposed to be hilarious aren't even mildly amusing--Sugarman will try anything for a
laugh from scratch-and-sniff bibles to falling down pants to drag lip-synching. Annie Mary
is the only character who changes at all during the film; all the others pretty much start
and end the same way.
The comparison to Waking Ned Divine is telling. It also took
provincial British small town folk and built a comedy out of a slight plot. But along the
way it built character and offered real charm. It's a disciplined and focused film, a
droll and winning light comedy. Sugarman, in contrast, throws ideas into the pot like a
cook out of control, and overloads her movie with unexplored characters and half-developed
situations Even Griffiths can't rescue this porridge of a picture.
- Arthur
Lazere
