August Rush (2007)

August Rush arrived in 2007 as a musical melodrama so thoroughly pickled in sentiment that critics could smell the brine from the press screening. Kirsten Sheridan directs the tale of Evan Taylor, an orphan with perfect pitch who flees the boys' home, follows the music to New York, and falls in with a Fagin-like vagrant called Wizard. The plot runs on coincidence the way a jukebox runs on quarters. Roger Ebert gave it three stars and conceded the thing was drenched in feeling, which was the point. Nearly everyone else reached for the word schmaltz and went home.

Where social consciousness is concerned, the film keeps its ambitions modest. The cast includes Terrence Howard, Mykelti Williamson, Leon Thomas III and Jamia Simone Nash in roles that carry no commentary on their own presence, and the screenplay asks nothing of them beyond competence. Lyla, played by Keri Russell, is a Juilliard-trained cellist with a career and a grief of her own, and the picture was directed by a woman, yet the emotional machinery exists to deliver a family reunion. Wizard's exploitation of homeless children gestures at the cruelty of adults who monetize talent, though the villainy stays personal and never systemic. Evan's savant abilities are framed as magic instead of a condition anyone actually lives with.

No LGBTQ characters appear. No climate anxiety intrudes on Central Park. Body image never surfaces as a subject. The film's preachiness is reserved for destiny, for the notion that music will reassemble a broken family if we simply believe hard enough, a sermon delivered with strings swelling underneath. Historians need not trouble themselves. What remains is a gentle, colorblind humanism of the sort already going out of fashion by 2007, sincere in its warmth and innocent of the cultural battles soon to consume the discourse. It is a film about listening. It has very little to say.