October 23, 2023 · Watch the trailer
John Carney has made a career out of writing and directing dramas that are musical without being full-fledged musicals.
The Irish filmmaker behind movies like Broadway crossover hit “Once,” the criminally underrated 2016 indie darling “Sing Street” and the more commercially successful “Begin Again” teams with Apple to take his unique perspective on modern life and musicality into a post-pandemic world with “Flora and Son,” a crisp yet shallow examination of the disconnect and interconnectivity of life on a personal and global scale.
The film follows the titular Flora, a divorced mom struggling to connect with her rebellious teenage son who finds her way through online music lessons with an American guitar teacher and the simplicity of their evolving friendship goes far beyond the computer screen and into a much more cinematic realm.
At the center of the film, Eve Hewson is solid as Flora, providing audiences with someone to genuinely respond to though there isn’t the depth to her character either on the script page or on the screen that really elevates the material to the usual level of Carney’s work.
It’s difficult to understand her chemistry or lack thereof with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jeff because so much of the film’s premise relies on the two never really seeing each other in person, although Carney’s somewhat frequent mild dream sequences that disengage reality to bring the two closer together truly provide a stellar hook to keep audiences invested in an otherwise muddled storyline.
For his part, Gordon-Levitt is equally solid as Jeff, though it’s clear that the two are not quite on the same page, probably in large part because it’s clear for the most part that they’re not in the same room performing scenes opposite each other and the digital connection doesn’t feel as authentic as the genuine chemistry between the leads in Carney’s other films.
What really keeps things going, however, are the moderately catchy musical number interwoven throughout the film which often play out almost as music videos interspliced within the narrative rather than stopgaps. This bit of filmmaking is stylistically similar to the way that Carney approached the music in both “Begin Again” and “Sing Street,” however both those films benefitted from a distinctive music video style that would feel more repetitive now.
Carney visually has replaced this with the blending of Flora and Jeff’s worlds in a faux-reality, cross-Atlantic fiction meeting within a scene that is the most dynamic element in the film but lacks the same heart overall as Carney’s other films.
The pacing of “Flora and Son” at just over 90 minutes and ease of access on Apple TV+ makes it worth an at home viewing for those unable to make their way to theaters quickly to see Apple’s biggest endeavor to date, teaming with Martin Scorsese for his Western epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” which at its three-and-a-half hour run time is certainly a theatrical experience but one that may be more difficult to easily carve out the time and effort to seek out quickly.
Both films have their time and place, especially for those who would have to make a longer trek to theaters to see Scorsese’s likely final feature.
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