Music and Lyrics
When I look Drew Barrymore up in my commonplace books (what you might call “imdb”), I find my latest theory confirmed: in her adult career, this lady has never failed to entertain me. While some actors, like the ever-charming Bruce Willis, seem to wander from hit to flop and back again, there is a certain consistency to the winsome Ms. Barrymore’s work that shows she (or her agent) is putting some thought into her career choices. Thus, I found myself looking upon her latest outing, “Music and Lyrics,” as a promising diversion for this Friday evening.
“Music and Lyrics” is the tale of has-been pop star Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a man whose one chance at keeping his career going hinges upon getting his substitute plant-care girl (Barrymore) to write lyrics for him. Both being enormously cute, as such people are in movies, one suspects quite rightly that they will eventually fall in love. And that their romance will be torpedoed like a German battleship facing a Bruce-Partington submersible at some point, giving them a mighty hurdle that only a montage of sadness and a supreme effort of reconciliation will remedy. This is a romantic comedy, of course, and that is what romantic comedies do.
But if you want to gibe and sneer at such “softer passion,” hold for a moment. “Music and Lyrics” gives its audience something more, and I think that is what makes it a cut above the standard romantic comedy. Yes, the lead characters, Alex Fletcher and Sophie Fisher, fall in love, but that part seems almost incidental to their creative melding. Their passion for their art seems to take precedence over their romantic entanglement . . . so much so that one finds the duet that climaxes their days of songwriting much more stirring than the more physical coupling that comes soon after.
The song to which Alex writes the music and Sophie the lyrics almost seems more important than their mutual attraction, and I think that is what the true student of movie detection will find most valuable about this film. That’s not to say there aren’t other treasures to be found within, scattered as freely as Jonathan Small once spread the Agra treasure in the waters of the Thames. What are they?
Kristen Johnson, most notably remembered in “Third Rock from the Sun” and “Austin Powers,” plays Sophie’s older sister with an exuberance that often threatens to lure the poor male viewer away from the lead. Hugh Grant has a Watson-like dependability about him in these situations and does not fail here. Brad Garrett may be a Scotland Yard man of comedy, but does manage to let you forget “Everybody Loves Raymond” for the duration of the movie.
Lampooning the 1980s is now almost a national sport, and here it’s handled with a lighter touch than Barrymore’s earlier “The Wedding Singer,” which is just about right. The script from Marc Lawrence, who both wrote and directed “Music and Lyrics,” fares better than some of his others did under other directorial hands, and I’m now very tempted to go back and rent his earlier Hugh Grant vehicle, “Two Weeks Notice.”
All in all, “Music and Lyrics” is a happy surprise, which I’d recommend to any student of the romantic comedy.
What Great-Grandfather Sherlock would have said about “Music and Lyrics”:
“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
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