Denied her full professorship by the machinations of academic bureaucracy, musicologist Lily Penleric is at a loss for what to do with herself. While staying with her sister Eleanor in her school in a small Appalachian town, Lily discovers that the British folk ballads she studied in her classroom are alive and well, carried down from generation to generation among the mountain people. And thus she begins a project to collect and record the music of the mountains.
I had been wanting to see The Songcatcher for quite a while after listening to the soundtrack over and over, despite being annoyed with some of the country-fied versions of the ballads recorded by Dolly Parton and her ilk. I was pleased to discover that none of those versions were actually in the movie. Instead, the music that can be heard on the soundtrack is the real deal, with all the raw emotion of music that exists to bring hope and life to the people who make it.
The Songcatcher doesn't take a completely traditional approach to storytelling. Many of the plot's loose ends are left open. Sometimes I was left wondering when I would get closure. Other times, I felt like what I was seeing on screen was...life. While a large portion of the dialogue, plot points, and characters feel hollow and cliché, this film is infused with the same love of traditional music that drove me to watch it in the first place. And with performances like Janet McTeer's as Lily and Aidan Quinn's as Tom, the mountain musician who eventually becomes her lover, a few of these stereotypes burst into life, with magnificent depth that almost manages to match the stunning glory of the Appalachian landscape and of course, the music that fills it.
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