Don’t you go sleeping on this movie. Don’t you dare!
Genre: Drama
Premise: A single mom eeking out a living in Dublin starts taking online guitar lessons on a whim, unexpectedly falling in love with music in the process.
About: An immediate hit at Sundance, Flora and Son is “Once” director, John Carney’s, newest musical treat. He came up with the idea by imagining a girl finding a guitar in a dumpster. He thought that was a great starting point for a movie.
Writer: John Carney
Details: About 100 minutes
For the last couple of months, I’ve been looking forward to The Creator.
With one caveat. Gareth Edwards wrote the script.
I know what happens when Garth Edwards writes scripts. It’s called, “Monsters.” His first film.
Him writing? Equals not good.
But it’s been a decade since that film. So I thought maybe he’s improved. But then I saw some of you Scriptshadow readers post your reactions. And I saw the RT score dwindle down with every successive refresh. Everybody seemed to be saying the same thing: The script let the movie down.
So, at the last second, I decided The Creator was not worth my 20 bucks.
But what to watch instead? I could watch Reptile. But I’d read the script already and found it average. The only other movie that had an inkling of potential was Flora and Son. John Carney, the director, wrote and directed one of the most powerful “do-it-yourself” movies ever made in, “Once.”
But then he made that glossy soulless Hollywood movie with Kiera Whatshername that looked the exact opposite of Once. It had zero soul. So I sort of gave up on the guy.
Well guess what? After watching this movie, I just might be John Carney’s number one fan.
Flora and Son follows 30-something Flora and her teenage son, Max, who live in Dublin. Flora spends most nights getting drunk and finding a warm body to regrettably wake up to the next morning. Flora drinks a lot of wine. Smokes a lot of cigarettes. And while she loves Max, he’s a troubled child who’s always stealing from local stores, making her life miserable.
Walking home one day, Flora finds an old guitar in a dumpster and gets it restrung at the local guitar shop. She mucks around online, trying to learn to play, until she finds a cute guy named Jeff from Los Angeles who gives online guitar lessons. She signs up purely out of attraction but when they start their lessons, she realizes Jeff is kinda broken and sad about the fact that he was never able to “become something” in the music world, and their lessons become just as much about her encouraging him as him helping her.
Meanwhile, in order to impress a girl out of his league, Max starts making dance/rap music on his computer, and when Flora finds out, she sees an opportunity to connect with him. After a while, they’re making music with each other, even bringing in Max’s deadbeat dad (once a musician himself) to help. They may not be a real family but this is better than nothing. Any future family may rest in the hands of Jeff. But will Flora ever be able to connect with him in the real world?
Before I get to the movie itself, holy effing garbanzo beans, this actress is a freaking mega-star! This is easily the best performance I’ve watched all year. And I don’t mean that in an Oscar way, where the performances they reward are more showy. It’s more that she’s so effortless in the role. I rarely see that anymore. Meryl Streep’s able to do it. Daniel-Day Lewis was able to do it.
There are several scenes where she’s just staring at the computer that I could’ve watched for another three hours. I don’t know what she did to prepare for this role. I don’t know why this woman isn’t already the lead actress in every Hollywood movie. She’s so godammned good. Wow.
Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way, Flora and Son is the feel-good movie of 2023. And the primary reason it works is because Carney doesn’t follow Hollywood structure. There isn’t a man who hates Hollywood more than John Carney, actually.
(Spoilers) I figured out, halfway through, that Flora and Jeff weren’t going to meet. I was both sad about this creative choice, but also thought it was genius. Because a lot can go wrong once you begin a love story. Once the two kiss and, later, sleep together, the sexual tension that was powering the relationship is gone and you have to move to other forms of relationship propulsion that are harder to pull off.
A movie like Titanic can do it because, after they’ve kissed and slept together, they still have to deal with an armed incensed fiancé and a giant sinking boat. There’s plenty there to keep us entertained. But with Flora and Son, if Flora goes to Los Angeles, you have to deal with that whole scene and you have to build the relationship within that unique world, all in half a movie? – lots of choppy waters there.
By never physically beginning the romance, you keep the audience in a perpetual state of hope and excitement. Is something going to happen between these two? How is it going to work?
It was a brave choice and specifically why Carney is so vocal about never working in Hollywood. It’s because he wouldn’t have been able to do that. A studio would’ve wanted Flora to go to Los Angeles.
Outside of the romance plot, we had the Flora and Son plot. This one was a little bumpier but it won me over in the end. The movie is about this woman who had her son way too young. She’s a partier. She’s a drinker. She’s a smoker. Her young husband was even less ready for a kid so he’s a mess too. For these reasons, she’s never been close to her kid. She’s open about the fact that he’s a burden to her.
So music helps her and her son connect. It’s cool the way Carney does it. On the one end, you have this woman who is learning acoustic guitar. On the other, you have this kid who’s more into rapping and dance beats. So to see them come together in the middle and find a sound was fun to watch.
But the star was the online relationship. Nobody has ever captured long-distance like Carney has here. Nobody. Not even close. The dialogue, in particular, was awesome! Maybe it was because Eve Hewson is such an amazing actress but watching these two connect with one another felt so authentic.
One screenwriting thing I learned via this romance was how using a separate topic makes the dialogue sooooooo much easier. For one, it gives the dialogue purpose. Each zoom session is a music lesson. So they have a goal (to teach her how to play). This makes it so much more fun when the two break from the lesson (usually instigated by Flora) because it interrupts what’s supposed to be happening and segues into conversations that “aren’t supposed to happen.” It’s specifically because they’re not supposed to happen that we enjoy them so much.
And, also, there’s so much more subtext when you do it this way. If these two would’ve been online dating and solely using their Zoom sessions to get to know each other, there’s zero subtext. It’s because they’re talking under the pretense of a music lesson that their budding romance is so fun to watch.
I can’t say enough about this movie. I thought it was great. It’s probably too light, in more ways than one, to get any Academy recognition. But Apple should do everything in their power to try and get Eve Hewson nominated. This girl is a superstar and one of my new favorite actresses. Right up there with Andie McDowel’s daughter, the Sweenster and Pew-Pew.
Oh, and one more thing. THIS MOVIE IS HILARIOUS! I laughed out loud LITERALLY 20 times. That’s 19 more times than I usually laugh out loud during a movie. Carney loves taking the piss out of every moment. Spoiler. After this heart-wrenching final performance, where every character has bared their soul in this song they came up with together, there are a lot of cheers in the crowd, but the very last line of the movie is a random crowd person yelling, “That was SHITE!” Clearly, Carney had fun here. And I was there for every second of it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use meaty subplots to subvert the romantic comedy genre. Flora and Son is, essentially, a rom-com. Two people falling in love. Romantic comedies are the most cliched movies in the genre business. So you have to subvert them to stand out. One way to do that is to add a big subplot, usually involving another character. You saw this, for example, in Jerry Maguire, with Rod Tidwell (Jerry’s lone client). And here, you see it with Max, the son. If you take out Rod Tidwell and Max from these movies, they are much more traditional and, therefore, more cliched.
