After seeing A Cinderella Story, I have
slowly become gaga over Hilary Duff. In all honesty, I
think she has been extremely underestimated by the
public and is one of the best teenage performers to ever
grace the likes of the silver-screen. Watching Duff act
is like a breath of fresh air, pardon the cliché. She is
fresh, inventive, creative, original—the list goes on
and on. There is something about her bubbly likes that
just makes me want to smile. Over the past two months,
I’ve bought her posters, CDs, DVDs, you name it. I’ve
watched her chat about her life and work on an insane
amount of talk shows. I’ve joined one of her fan-site’s
message boards.
Before heading off to school
on the day of Raise Your Voice’s release, I
danced around to her recently released, self-titled
album, in my room, the perkiest a teenage male could
ever be. But, I can’t say I didn’t see the poor quality
of Raise Your Voice coming. But, as predictable
as the awfulness of Raise Your Voice was, I can’t
say I was prepared for it.
In the movie, Duff plays Terri
Fletcher, an average teenage girl who has musical
aspirations and would like to receive voice-training at
a respected school in Los Angeles, over a summer’s time.
She applies for a scholarship, despite her father (a
truly awful David Keith) not supporting such. She is
accepted, but only after she and her brother (Jason
Ritter) undergo a car accident when they run a red
light. He dies. The event turned Terri off to music, but
the scholarship inspires her to immerse herself into the
world of singing, once again. Since her father is still
disapproving of his daughter moving to L.A. for the
summer, Terri and her mother (Rita Wilson) decide to
create a plan to fool him. They tell him that she will
be staying with her artsy aunt (Rebecca DeMornay) in
Palm Desert and they use three-way calling as a plan of
diversion. At the music school, she has a small romance
with Jay (Oliver James) and is challenged by a music
teacher played by John Corbett. Close calls with Dad and
a big final singing performance are to be expected.
Raise Your Voice was
probably designed with the sole purpose of boosting
Duff’s latest album to the top of the Billboard Charts,
as two songs from it are featured in performances in the
movie. From that standpoint, I suppose it’s an adequate
vehicle for marketing for a much better, artistically
pleasing piece of work. Hilary Duff, the CD, is
rather brilliant, both atmospheric and moody,
juxtaposing beats of tracks and such, transitioning
between them with brilliance. Several of the songs on it
are modern masterpieces, even if many will deny their
genius because they could be considered “uncool”. I wish
I could say the same for the movie. It is, on the other
hand, as unoriginal and blasé as the medium of film
comes. Most every part of it could be considered a
disastrous failure.
Most of Raise Your Voice’s
problems do not come as a result of several terrible
supporting performances or the inappropriate
hyperkinetic, music-video-like direction. It is Sam
Schreiber’s abominable, loathsome screenplay that really
doesn’t sit with me. I, unlike many, can accept the fact
that the story is conventional: I have nothing against
the entire “follow your dreams” theme. If done well with
the correct amount of spice, even clichés can seem
fresh, and make for an enjoyable motion picture.
However, Shreiber leaves so many open ends and
contradictions in his script, you would think him to be
working with revelatory, complex material. This all goes
without mentioning the cheesy lines (“This place is
the scariest, hardest, best thing that has ever happened
to me.”), some of which really made me want to slap
myself in the face.
One of the tackiest elements
of Shreiber’s work and his director, Sean McNamara’s,
lies in the continuity in the romance between Terri and
Jay. At the end of the movie, I questioned if what they
had together, throughout the duration, could even be
called a relationship. In one of the scenes in the
movie, Terri sees Jay kissing his ex-girlfriend (the
pathetic “I wasn’t kissing her! She was kissing me!”
cliché is explored here). She cries and does not
understand his behavior. Yet, two scenes later,
everything is okay between them. They never discuss the
event again. In a good movie, this could function as a
symbol of denial and repellence in a relationship. In
Raise Your Voice, it’s a sign of a screenwriter and
a director not knowing where they want their characters
to go, before they have to reach a conclusion. Because
Terri and Jay have to play a song together at the end of
the movie, her feelings for him must be patched by the
time that moment comes.
The thing that stumps me the
most about the movie, though, regards Terri’s fellow
students. They are attending a music school, and yet
they have no apparent passion for their work beyond that
of “Hey, c’mon! Jump in!” They play their
instruments and sing for hours on end and they don’t
even seem to really like what they’re doing, or have any
attachment towards such. We get the sense that the
school Terri attends could be one which focuses
anything: the characters aren’t exactly what you would
call plausible music-types. In a solid movie about
rhythms and beats (Mr. Holland’s Opus), the notes
are a commonplace in the plot. Raise Your Voice
abuses the art-form to allow its conventions to
progress.
I’m willing to go wherever
Duff takes me; she is wonderful. Even if I did have to
sit through the triteness of Raise Your Voice, I
remain one of her most avid fans. The day that she finds
the stability in her career to abandon her target
audience of ‘tweenage girls, I will be enlightened. But,
she does what she does well, without a doubt. Never in
my dreams did I think something like The Lizzie
McGuire Movie would deserve a perfect score on my
ratings scale, but, because of her, that surprising
moment came. Thankfully, Raise Your Voice is
forgettable and breezy enough that it will leave Duff’s
resume unharmed. As sad as I am that it has only made
$4.6 million in its opening weekend, at least people
will not be remembering her for it. As an artist, she
can take criticism when her films are just plain bad.
Raise Your Voice, even with few aspirations, is,
unfortunately, exactly this.
-Danny, Bucket Reviews (10.10.2004)