Apple TV+. 2023. Drama. 94 min.
Grade: 3 out of 4
For those worried that Irish director John Carney, a true romantic and master conveyor of how music connects people, would finally run out of gas with his latest sweet natured and tuneful bauble, fear not: With the prickly and pleasurable Flora and Son, Carney has found new thematic and stylistic avenues for his lonely and longing characters to explore. He still romanticizes music in the same deeply felt manner and he still, after a brief detour in New York for Begin Again, stays tightly focused on the more down-market areas of his favored Dublin. But this story of a mother and son who can barely stand each other and the online music teacher who will help them reconnect has Carney singing in a register that mixes plenty of music, a touch of magical realism, and shards of working-class authenticity usually reserved for a Dardenne brothers drama. Nobody expresses more beautifully, or convinces us more gracefully, that music has the power to save us better than Carney. Yes, in Flora and Son he plays many of the notes he’s played before, but he once again arranges them to create a touching new tune.
If Carney is the composer of this slightly tough, slightly melancholy new song, its powerful lead singer is Eve Hewson, who plays Flora. She’s a spiky and foul-mouthed single parent of Max (Orén Kinlan) a 14-year-old delinquent who spares no four-letter word directed at his exasperated mother. In a star-making turn, Hewson plays Flora as no fool, even if she’s made her share of foolish choices. Living in a shoebox apartment with a hellion of a kid she birthed at 17 and not above stealing money from the rich woman whose baby she nannies, Flora is in desperate need of direction and purpose. It’s a good thing she’s in a John Carney film.
Carney makes musicals but without the affectations of a musical. There are no jazz hands and the movie doesn’t stop for the big smiles and big dance moves of the big 11 o’clock number. Watching the unglamorous urban environments of Flora and Son even makes one reconsider films like Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born, about as glamorously grungy a presentation of suicidal alcoholism as you’ll ever see. Carney’s songs in Flora and Son, co-written by Gary Clark, are simple, sometimes purposely amateurish, and up from the streets in a way that characters not yet in touch with their deepest feelings would probably write them. But before Flora can attain musical salvation, she needs to learn to appreciate music as much as Max does. Max, who is one shoplift away from juvie, is more interested in rap so when Flora fishes an acoustic guitar from a worksite dumpster, fixes it up, and gives it to him as a (belated, Flora is no model mother) birthday gift, he couldn’t care less.
One of Carney’s many gifts is the coffee house authenticity with which he imbues his films, and that’s why Flora’s decision to pick up the guitar and find someone on the internet to give her lessons feels disappointingly modern for someone with such an old fashioned sensibility. But Carney is such the sentimentalist even he can make a relationship between two people 5,000 miles apart on Zoom work like an Irish charm. After cycling through various online guitar hero never-beens, Flora signs up with Jeff, a Carney creation if there ever was one. Jeff is a handsome, laid-back musical philosophizer who uses Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now as proof of music’s transcendence and looks as if sprung from the soil in Topanga Canyon where he currently lives. Jeff is played by a charming Joseph Gordon-Levitt as someone at peace (mostly) with his failure to become a rich and famous musician and has settled into his easy listening, musical evangelist phase. As Flora and Jeff explore their chemistry through music, the clever Carney often puts Jeff physically in the room next to Flora which not only avoids the boredom of seeing two characters on a Zoom call for 94 minutes, but it also suggests that music removes all barriers and brings people together.
Carney’s script, like his others, is generous to all his characters, finding room for Flora’s attempts to connect with Jeff, reconnect with Max, and even potentially reconcile with her ex-husband Ian (a snippy, witty Jack Reynor), a former rocker ready at a moment’s notice to remind you that his band once opened for Snow Patrol. That all these characters love, hate, and love again through music is crucial to the spell that Carney casts over us; such positivity never seems facile, overly innocent, cloying, or reductive. At this point in his career, we can safely assume this is the world as Carney sees it —or would like it to be—channeled through his musically inclined characters.
Flora and Son sees Carney in a more intimate minor key mode after the slightly broader Begin Again and Sing Street; the movie shines every moment Hewson (the daughter of U2’s Bono) is on screen but Carney is not stretching himself as much as he’s found a new corner of his sandbox to play in. Yet we wouldn’t have it any other way. If none of the film’s songs hit the heartbreaking and revelatory high of Once‘s Falling Slowly, why would they? Flora and Max are promising, striving amateurs while Jeff, the quasi-professional, still requires Flora’s help to improve one of his tunes. All that matters is that Carney once again argues with warmth, honesty, cheeky humor, and a lack of sentimentality that music can connect even the most physically and emotionally distant of souls. It may sound corny, but dammit if he doesn’t make it sing.