Movie Review - 'August Rush'

August Rush

Starring Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Robin Williams
Directed by Kristen Sheridan
Rated PG

August Rush makes a critical mistake, and then does it twice. As if it weren’t bad enough that the film uses the mysterious and universal draw of music as the year’s silliest cliché – some kind of inner dialogue between parents and their long lost child that the orphan hopes to one day use to his advantage to somehow find his folks – August Rush then applies the same kind of “logic” to the prodigious talent it insists is necessary to make the music an aural compass to happiness in the first place.

Evan (Freddie Highmore from Finding Neverland) has never given up on his dream of finding his real parents. He’s lived his entire life in a home for boys, although it’s fair to say all the real living he’s done has been within his own head.

He makes inner symphonies of the sounds around him – wind chimes, crickets chirping, the long grass of upstate New York blowing softly in the breeze, the monotonous din of power lines – and then he, I don’t know, projects those symphonies out into the ether somewhere for his parents to hear.

His mother (Keri Russell) and father (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) are musicians, one classically trained, one a product of blue-eyed Irish soul, and they shared one night and, as it happens in movies, a son. The baby was taken from her at birth, for reasons that become more clear as August Rush makes its melodramatic case, but the father never heard from her again, so he has no clue he could’ve ever been a father, much less that his son was making melodies out of traffic noise trying to reach him.

This movie is as sappy as a forest of Vermont maple trees. There are no natural developments, only fits of drama thrown strategically in the characters’ paths towards a unavoidable destiny.

Worst of all, it takes advantage of the prodigy in its midst, young Mr. Highmore, to sprinkle some faerie dust over a story that has no other soul. Neither Russell nor Rhys Meyers show much life, and Robin Williams, cast as a hustler trying to sink his teeth into the young Mozart for profit, is about as bad as he’s ever been, and you could fill the Grand Canyon with his wretched, off-target performances.

Poor Highmore is the only one who appears to believe what he’s doing, perhaps because he’s just that good and perhaps because he’s too young to know how artificial August Rush really is.