“This is a gift you can take to your grave, and you can use it however you want,” the distraught yet overly optimistic Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says in his video lesson to Flora (Eve Hewson). “And in the right context, it can speak directly to your heart in ways we don’t even understand.”
Flora and Son is a sweet, feel-good and downright funny movie about music and its power to heal, transform, and bring people together. If there’s anyone to capture to love and joy of music in film, it is director John Carney, who brought us my favorite film Begin Again, but also the infamous music films Once and Sing Street.
The premise is simple. Flora is a single mom to a troubled teenage son, whose dad is a washed-up ex-musician, who both sacrificed a lot to raise their son. In the attempt to bring some light into her and her son’s life again, she takes up the guitar and is drawn to the warmth and realness of LA musician Jeff.
The rest will unfold.
What I loved about this movie is that it is self-aware enough to know its own boundaries before becoming too poetic in drawing you in to the music, before showing you just how much these characters genuinely love it.
You have a kid who can’t do anything right except learn to make and produce music on his laptop.
You have a mom who sacrificed much of her life early on and wants to “be cool” and relate to her son.
You have a washed-up LA musician who teaches lessons online and is joyful yet cynically judgmental about what “good music is” and what makes a great song.
One of the moments I loved the most was when Jeff was explaining to Flora how you can know three chords or know all the chords, yet how you play it gives it character.
He goes on to play a song he wrote in a standard three-chord progression, to then playing it slower, with finger-picking, and “a lot of years of heartache” to inform his performance.
It’s the moments like that that I loved the most.
As a musician myself who has been playing guitar for well over half her life, covered songs, wrote songs, struggled to get them out and live, my talent and taste often becomes withered. In light of all the mass media and music and radio we see and hear today, I often find myself being cynical like the “washed up LA musician” Jeff is. I know the industry, I know how much an image sells, I know the power of branding and marketing, and I know the confidence behind putting yourself behind your work, wholly.
I may not be the greatest guitarist in the world, and in my early twenties I began to recognize, realize and accept that, simply because I was drawn to players who had a voice. Who played with a little more soul. More “oomph.” Even if there were other players shredding and playing scales and knowing just about all the complicated chords, what stood out to me were the soulful players who had “that thing.” That’s their voice coming through. Their personal flavor, sauce, personality, feeling.
For a movie like Flora and Son, it’s easy to enjoy. It doesn’t try to be anything more than what it is. Hewson delivers a funny, spunky and foul-mouthed character with such a charm that brings a nice warmth out of Gordon-Levitt’s downtrodden musicianship who hasn’t had a break and seeks to find his new muse.
I could touch on many points in this film, but I’ll leave it at that.
It’s beautiful, real, authentic and charming — without trying to be anything other than what it already is. And there’s power in that.
beauty within 