{"id":8310,"date":"2020-03-18T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8310"},"modified":"2020-03-17T20:58:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-18T00:58:00","slug":"wild-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/18\/wild-rose\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Rose."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast<\/a><\/em> back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy<\/em>, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose<\/em>, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon<\/a> and iTunes<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail\nas the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie\nWalters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served\nout her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film).\nShe’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get\nto Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her\nkids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her\nmother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo,\nwho does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get\nto Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wild Rose<\/em> is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag\nenough times to get away from most of the clich\u00e9s of the genre \u2013 notably the\nway such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their\nprotagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every\ntime she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her\nown irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t\naccepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden\nshe places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and\ndriven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her\nin spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There\nare some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script\navoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the\nmajority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known\ncountry songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular\nstandout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a\nfew originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),”\nco-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along\nwith “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations,\nat least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John\/Bernie\nTaupin track that won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buckley is an absolute star, though \u2013 she’s magnetic on\nscreen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British\nreality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school\nand eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take\nfor her to land a  role in a major film that\ngets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which\nshe was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in”\nstatus for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four\nnominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received\nhere. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off\nthe star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the\nplot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just\nperfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s\njust atypical enough to be satisfying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1077,161,215,218],"class_list":["post-8310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-movies","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","tag-musicals","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8310"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8313,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8310\/revisions\/8313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}