Film - Hear My Song (1991)

The man that makes the blarney.

Hear My Song is a gentle, whimsical Irish musical comedy co-written and directed by Peter Chelsom (Hannah Montana the Movie, but don't let that put you off) - very, very, very loosely based on a true story. It concerns a failing huckster of a Liverpool music hall impresario, Micky O'Neill, whose already-on-the-rocks establishment - in which his best act is impersonator Franc Cinatra, whose only resemblance to Old Blue Eyes is his hat - comes under threat of closure at just the same instance as his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy takes a sharp nosedive into "it's complicated", while her mother looks at him like a slimy con-artist who doesn't deserve to lick Nancy's boots. His solution to both these problems? Find Josef Locke, famed Irish tenor who fled the English taxman back to his native shores (there, that's the first true part of the film) - leaving behind "a beauty queen, a Jaguar sportscar, and a pedigree dalmation, all of them pining" - and bring him back for a command performance. Except the man Micky books as "Mr X" isn't Josef Locke (and a mysterious man called Mr X who many believed to be Josef Locke is the second and final true part. Told you it was 'loosely'.). Micky is fooled by the impostor but Nancy's mother, the beauty queen (Shirley Anne Field, The Pink Panther Strikes Again) left behind by Locke, isn't, and Micky's relationship and business are ruined. The only thing for it? Travel to Ireland, meet up with an old friend, and go on an endearingly quirky rural journey to find the real Josef Locke.

'Smoking in a pub' makes Hear My Song an Unintentional
Period Piece.

Leading the talented cast is co-writer Adrian Dunbar (Ashes to Ashes, The Crying Game) who plays Micky with an affable oily roguishness - like an Irish Han Solo, but with fewer lasers and more lying. From an actor who seems to have largely - before this role and since - played sleazy, cold-hearted criminals, it's a surprisingly amiable performance that keeps the audience on his side even as they wince at his spiralling lies and tut at his contemptibly obsequious wheeler-dealing, and the script happily piles on slice after slice of humble pie for him to eat - or be force-fed - until he's finally been knocked low enough (and then down a few more rungs for good measure) to be worthy of his vivacious girlfriend and his own business. His  misadventures with compatriot Fintan O'Donnell as they meet with unhelpfulness and suspicion from the rural Irishmen they ask for information about Locke, and then are given the runaround by Locke himself and his cronies, result in more than their fair share of humiliation and comic injuries, including but not limited to bar fights, alarmingly unsafe impromptu dentistry, near-blinding, and almost being thrown off a cliff. Throughout these scenes, Dunbar demonstrates a finely-judged willingness to look ridiculous and be humiliated in the role without ever sending it up. Dunbar allows the true nuance of the performance to shine through in his scenes with Locke and later with Nancy, as Micky realises that humility and sincerity can be more persuasive than the silverest of tongues.

"If Locke doesn't want to listen to my offer, perhaps I'll have
to leave this enormous cow's head in his bed."

Joining him as Fintan is stalwart Northern Irish actor James Nesbitt (Murphy's Law, The Hobbit), who only misses out on being the incompetent comic relief to Dunbar's straight man by dint of the pair of them actually being near-matched in buffoonery, though Fintan is less devious and slippery than Micky and consequently comes in for significantly less abuse. The pair abound with Irish wit and one-liners as they wheedle, coax, charm and beg their way past unhelpful Irish locals to the even more unwelcoming tax-exiled tenor himself. Micky wryly implores Locke to think of the effect his return would have on his female admirers, assuring him that "there won't be a dry seat in the house". In another instance, he admonishes Fintan that he is "drivin' like a madman". "You think this is bad?" his friend replies, "You should see me when I'm on me own!". Micky's reply is to remark that "sure I'd hate to be with you when you're on your own". Despite such dry deadpanning, they also demonstrate an affinity for slapstick in a scene in which, surely inspired by the old joke about the men who find an enormous hole in the ground while out walking in the woods, they throw a log down an ineffably deep well, and then fall over themselves trying to stop the cow tied to the other end of a very long rope following it down.

"Is that a bird or a plane, Mr Luthor?!"
"Wrong film, Ned."

Appearing as the main man himself is American actor Ned Beatty (Superman the Movie, Deliverance, Silver Streak), who I presume was chosen for his visual resemblance to Locke - though his Irish accent is perfectly serviceable as well, even if he doesn't actually do the singing parts himself. Generally unseen until the final third of the movie, Beatty damn-near steals the film away from the leads as the tax-exiled and reclusive Locke, whose large profile and initial menace upon his discovery make him resemble nothing so much as an unwisely-awoken bear. Locke is technically a criminal by English law, and so his introduction is swiftly followed by his threat to drop the investigative duo from a cliff, but Beatty plays the role with a twinkle in his eye and it's hard to say what's threat and what's showmanship. He swiftly warms to Micky and Fintan after (what else?) having a drink with the pair, and he agrees to come back to England with Micky for one last sell-out performance to revive his failing club. There's a very nice scene where he reflects with Micky on the difficulty of living up to the legendary image that has grown up around him. Spotting some young women of the kind who used to scream for him at the music halls, he asks "Do you see those girls, Micky? Would you like to be responsible for their dreams?". It's a sobering scene, as Locke reflects on the danger in a comeback that might expose his failings now that his old fans' rose-tinted glasses have worn out, but it's appropriate that the faded romantic Locke is ultimately the one who pushes Micky into realising the importance of winning back Nancy. The singing itself, dubbed by Vernon Midgely, is utterly fantastic, and while Irish tenors may be something of a niche product to sell to today's music buyers, the songs chosen to represent Locke's oeuvre here are pleasant and melodic but also rich and powerful. William "Porkins" Hootkins (Star Wars: A New Hope) has a small, amusing role as the comically theatrical show-off Mr X, and David McCallum (NCIS, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) crops up throughout as the detective who's made it his life's work to track down the elusive Locke, and has started to lose his grip on sanity for his troubles.

 

Nancy had always found Micky's large ears his most 
fascinating feature.

Fresh from drama school in the small but key role of Micky's dentist girlfriend Nancy is the sparkling Tara Fitzgerald (Brassed Off, Sirens), who probably achieved the fastest typecasting of any actress in history when she leapt out of bed, very naked, just minutes into the film when an incensed Nancy storms out of the bedroom after Micky fails to adequately convince her of his devotion. It's a genuinely funny scene, and Fitzgerald impresses with both her bravery and her comically furious delivery - hysterically shrieking "vice versa!?", Micky's feeble rejoinder to her mid-coital cries of "I love you!", as she pulls her dress on and runs off into the night - but a cynic might say (and he will) that it's hard to shake the feeling that Fitzgerald is being used as a "thank you for watching" present for the audience. I'm sufficiently well-adjusted that I don't feel the need to sign myself 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' whenever a thespian tackles a scene in the nude - one could hardly appreciate Fitzgerald's body of work if it were otherwise - but there's a time and a place and it just doesn't sit quite right in this quirky and whimsical oddball of a film. But, in the interest of balance, I can't say the film really serves the character all that badly either. Nancy is an unusually strong rom-com love interest, and Fitzgerald's performance, full of gamine charm, is at its most nuanced in her early scenes, compassionately but firmly holding Micky at arm's length for the eventual good of the relationship. It's a shame that neither Nancy nor mother Kathleen really appear much outside of the first and final acts, as the film is sorely lacking any kind of feminine influence for the majority of its runtime, but Fitzgerald makes more of her role than its brevity asks of her, especially with some charming facial expressions in her wordless first scene where she reacts to Micky's serenade at his club, and a scene near the end where Nancy puts her own spin on one of Micky's classic spiels and out-shysters him. Her stand-out moment, perhaps predictably, is the reconciliation in Nancy's office: we can see that her impulse is to forgive and forget but she must, sensibly and cautiously, reassure herself that Micky truly is changed first. These scenes can often be overplayed and melodramatic, but director and actors resist the temptation to wring cheap tears and fuzzies from it, and the scene is all the more real and affecting for it.

This film might hold some kind of record for 'number of times
a crowd is addressed through a microphone'.

It's quite a clever move by writers Chelsom and Dunbar to tie together Micky's personal and professional goals in his single 'quest', as Micky's attempts to win back his nightclub, given that he doesn't seem to deserve it, probably wouldn't have been sympathetic enough by themselves. In many ways, this film is your standard rom-com plot, in that boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy makes amends and learns some lessons, boy gets girl back again. Far too many films make the basis of the break-up some trivial and unlikely misunderstanding, which has the side effect of making the man look dense for failing to just spit it out and the woman look paranoid and vindictive for jumping to conclusions and refusing to listen, in what the writers surely must realise is a tremendous disservice to both genders - not to mention a very poor indicator that the relationship itself will last any longer than the ending credits. It's a disappointing but predictable trap to fall into: if the relationship is to survive, the cause of the temporary rift naturally cannot be a real deal-breaker. The cleverness of Hear My Song is not that it subverts the gender roles of the offender and the offendee, but that it alters the dynamics of the relationship instead. Nancy's mother Colleen was a risk-taking beauty queen who probably had her share of ill-advised beaus (Josef Locke, for one), and Nancy herself has clearly carried on in the same vein, taking a bit of a punt on Micky in the hope that the slippery exterior hides a heart of gold - sadly, she is being all too reasonable when she concludes that it does not. The break-up between the sheets feels like just the latest in a long line of minor but cumulative hints that Micky just isn't as invested in this relationship as she is. Yes, Micky is unworthy, approaching both his club and his girlfriend with the same strings of evasions and broken promises, and does need a few life lessons courtesy of his adventure to reevaluate his priorities. It's only when he's trying to convince Locke to return that he realises that getting his club back is only a secondary consideration to repairing his relationship with Nancy. Although Micky undergoes the customary herculean tasks and abject humiliation, Nancy neither sees nor demands them, and their final reconciliation comes about not through overblown romanticism as we might expect, but simple humility and compromise. You know, like it does with real people and not movie caricatures.

No witty comments here. Just... wow. What a gorgeous shot.

Director Peter Chelsom clearly has an eye for visual flair, composing some striking and often amusing shots - there's a particularly nice revolving shot around Mr X as he plays up his sense of mystery by fluttering a magically-produced dove around his hand, and the coven of lady owners of Micky's club all crammed onto one couch has to be seen to be believed. The Irish countryside is photographed beautifully although, to be even-handed about it, it would perhaps be more remarkable if they hadn't made it look spectacular, given what they had to work with. But Hear My Song truly comes alive at the night scenes, the dull grey washout of day replaced with the stark blues and blacks of night and the burning golds of candlelight and chandeliers. The film ends in a sort of low-key version of The Blues Brothers: no car wrecks, but with a final belter of a performance surrounded by police, as McCallum's unhinged detective smashes a crane into the club in desperation to stop Locke's show.

In terms of tone and style, although it is slightly more musical, Hear My Song owes a substantial debt to Bill Forsyth's fantastic 1983 film Local Hero, in which an American oil company rep ends up falling in love with the rustic and eccentric Scottish coastal town he was supposed to be persuading to sell up. Although happy to throw their heroes into bizarre and sometimes humiliating situations, and though they maintain a somewhat whimsical state of heightened reality, both films develop their characters with a fondness and attention that raises the plot above the sitcom level of city slicker vs crafty yokels, and with a perfectly small-scale focus that ensures their happy endings feel earned rather than given. For all that, Hear My Song is not perfect: the lures of some gentle comedy, clever dialogue, snappy music, amusing (for once in a blue moon) relationship drama and even a naked Tara Fitzgerald aren't quite enough to grab you into a meandering first act that's essentially the film lacing its shoes up for thirty minutes; the offbeat, almost-surreal musical humour (Micky's two large helpers spontaneously bursting into dance on the street and being mistaken for buskers, for example) is infrequent enough that it can come across a little forced when it does crop up; and the final ending scene might be a little stagey and saccharine for some, if indeed the whole film isn't. However, it's my review, and Hear My Song has fine acting, witty banter, humorous situations, colourful characters, Irish stereotypes, brilliant music, and a quirkily original story. Go watch it.

8/10 - Worth at least a tenor