Music and Lyrics (2007)

Music and Lyrics arrives from 2007, a year when a romantic comedy could still be sold on the premise of two attractive people in a room with a piano. Hugh Grant plays Alex Fletcher, a former eighties pop idol reduced to state fairs, and Drew Barrymore plays Sophie, the plant waterer with a gift for rhyme. The film's central joke, that the machinery of pop stardom is absurd and mildly corrupting, is delivered with a shrug. Marc Lawrence directs as though the audience might wander off at any moment, and he is probably right to worry.

The picture gestures toward a wider world without committing to it. Aasif Mandvi appears in support, and Cora Corman's big production number is staged in Bollywood colors, treated as spectacle from a safe distance. This is decoration, not representation. Sophie does have an arc about recovering her voice after a professor turned her into a character in his novel, and the film grants her a small victory over that man. Her fulfillment still arrives through the male lead, and the arrangement is thoroughly conventional. The art-versus-commerce thread is present, with Sophie accusing Alex of selling out, but it dissolves into a comfortable ending inside the very industry it teased.

Elsewhere the film is a clean slate. No environmental concerns, no body politics, no neurodivergent characters, no historical revisionism, no engagement with race as a subject. The sermonizing about authenticity is brief and gentle, more charm than instruction. There is little else here beyond a competent, lightly cynical romance that asks nothing of its audience and offers little to classify. A period piece, in its way, though it was made only a few years ago.