Sunday Review: Country Strong

Susan:
In the introductory writing course I teach, we tell the students that they should set up their credibility in their first paragraph.  So with that in mind, I want to say that I walked into the Sunday morning showing of Country Strong in Austin, TX (one of the supposed settings for the movie) in theater one at the AMC in the Barton Creek Mall.  What was playing in theater two?  If you guessed a movie, you would be wrong.  Because they were holding A CHURCH SERVICE in theater two.  Praise hymns blaring, awkward teens in the lobby each holding their own individual Bibles, boys scolding their female friends for holding the door for them (I am not kidding).  And if that ain’t Texan, I don’t know what is.

What I’m saying here is that I live within the world this movie was trying to portray.  I grew up in the rural Midwest, another country hotbed, and now I live in Texas.  And this movie was such a pandering, phony, bullshit thing, I wanted to throw something at the screen.

Let me give a brief summary of Country Strong; or Watch Gwyneth Paltrow Pander To What She Thinks Middle America Is.  Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund) is a young honky-tonk country singer (he’s supposed to be the “authentic” or “real country” one and yet dude can’t even grow a proper beard) whose day job is at the rehab center where fading Faith-Hill-esque superstar Kelly Canter (Paltrow) is detoxing from like, booze and sadness or whatever.  Her husband James Canter (Tim McGraw) pulls her out of rehab before she’s all the way better to go on a three stop tour of Texas (because that is a thing people do apparently) that will end in Dallas, where some awful, unnamed thing has happened in the past.  She demands Beau open for her, but her husband wants pageant queen Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) to open instead because she is hot and bad at performing.  Your basic music tour/struggle with mental illness movie follows.  Beau and Kelly sleep together; James and Chiles sleep together; then Beau and Chiles fall in love and decide not to be famous because “fame and love can’t live in the same place.”  Oh and Kelly kills herself (spoiler alert but seriously whatever, who didn’t see that one coming?).

It wasn’t as ridiculous as Glitter, and all the actors turned in decent performances.  But it didn’t matter, because from the very first scene of the movie when Beau is performing in a Nashville bar, it is clear that NONE of these actors (except Tim McGraw) have any understanding of country music or the people who love it.  They are doing their best impersonation of the kind of country tough the movie wants to be about, but what it actually looks like is the poppy, inauthentic crap version of country the movie critiques.  I used to hate Gwyneth Paltrow, but now I really hate her.  Why not let someone who actually cares about country music do this movie instead of the Marie Antoinette of American celebrity?

Geoff:
Yup, yup, yup, yup. You’re absolutely right that there wasn’t one goddamn authentic thing in the entire film. On top of that, it was as close to incoherent as a film can be. From scene to scene, the film forgets where it’s headed and what it’s trying to do, and the characters forget what they were just doing and who they seem to care for. One minute Paltrow loves Beau and her husband’s an asshole, and then she loves him again and he cares kinda, and then Chiles and Beau suddenly have a thing, and then Paltrow’s back with Beau for just a scene, and then he’s back with Chiles, and what the hell is going on??? Since when are country megastars able to escape the press for long enough to hop on the back of a train car? Since when is that something that a country megastar would even do? How does she get back to where she was from that train car??? Since when does a tour not get canceled after the megastar breaks down onstage during the first show and fails to even MAKE IT TO THE STAGE for the second show? For the first two thirds of the movie, the characters are panicking about how the tour might be canceled because Paltrow can’t cut it. Over and over they’re panicking about this. Guess what: the show would have been canceled.

Also, let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that, because this film takes place over the course of just three legs of a tour, everything is theoretically unfolding in the span of … what? A week at most? I saw this with two good friends from grad school who were kind enough to accompany me, and when Chiles runs to Beau’s room after the second show to panic AGAIN about it possibly being canceled, we were almost rolling on the floor.

How did this movie get made? What producer watched it and said, “Yeah, this at least makes sense on the most basic levels of logic and empathy.”

Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie for trying to pretend like it knows the country crowd, and fuck this movie for not even trying to put itself together and be a presentable product. It just wants your money. Do not offer it over.

Susan:
OH MY GOD AND CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE BABY QUAIL????  THAT FUCKING QUAIL OH MY GOD.

Since our readers haven’t seen the film, let me talk about the baby quail.  When Kelly is in rehab, she finds a baby quail and starts feeding it and keeps it in a little wooden box.  She lost a baby, so she’s found something to mother.  Bitches be crazy, right guys???  But then her husband takes it away from her for some unknown reason and then carries with him LITERALLY EVERYWHERE for the rest of the movie.  Seeing Beau play at a honky-tonk?  There’s the quail.  Recording songs with Chiles?  THERE IT IS AGAIN.  Good thing too, because he gave it back to Kelly to cheer her up about Chiles recording her song, and then she straightened up and performed really well that night.  MAYBE IF YOU JUST LET HER KEEP THE QUAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE SINCE IT’S A METAPHOR FOR HER SELF-WORTH OR SOMETHING.

Oh and ALSO, there are no biker bars in Austin on 38 1/2 St., even though Beau throws out “Miss Kitty’s on thirty-eighth and a half” like it ain’t no thang.  That is in Hyde Park, the Park Slope of Austin.  I mean, there is a cute coffeeshop called Cherrywood where you can get fun sandwiches on 38th 1/2.  They have a comedy open mic on Tuesdays that is worth checking out.  My poetry writing group used to meet there.  But bikers?  In Austin?  I don’t know where they hang out, but it sure as hell ain’t Hyde Park.

You know I love to suspend my disbelief.  And I really, really tried.  I mean, the music was decent, I thought (probs going to download “Timing is Everything” when it shows up on the iTunes, if I’m being honest with myself) and there were moments of something that resembled gravitas.  But overall, I’m just pissed that Hollywood thinks everyone in the rest of the country is stupid.  People will probably like this flick, but people (and yes, Hollywood, unlike you, I think country music fans are people) deserve better.  I don’t mind bad, but I do mind bullshit, especially when it insults the part of the country I come from.

Geoff:
We are parting ways on that duet, Susan. I mean, I like my share of country music, but if I have to hear or watch Beau and Chiles sing that thing while staring into each other’s eyes ever again, I might find a knife to plunge into my own chest. I hate when a movie about musicians doesn’t know how to do anything but point the camera at them and then at people in the audience, watching in rapt attention, over and over again. They’re good performers. I get it. But Jesus Christ, if you’re the songwriter for the film, please put together more than three goddamn tunes that I’ll have to listen to over and over and over.

Paltrow does indeed look and sing like a country megastar in the one scene where she manages to actually perform in front of the crowd, and pretty much every bit of press on this film has boiled down basically to “Gee whiz, Paltrow sang her own songs!” If that’s all that’s impressive, though, then maybe she should just be a country singer instead of making a bullshit movie about it.

Also, I know how much you love to suspend your disbelief, Susan, and I too will suspend my disbelief for whatever world the film creates for itself. However, I will not suspend my disbelief on the level of complete and total logical fallacy. This film doesn’t even follow its own rules. It made them, and then it broke them a hundred different ways.

This is not a good movie. Put on some Faith Hill and sing along, and you’ll get the same effect for cheap.