SUBSTANTIAL degrees of good will towards the admirable Kirsten Sheridan - daughter of Jim, director of Disco Pigs and several excellent shorts - proved insufficient to blind me to the galloping inadequacies of her strange, ambitious, infuriating new film.
August Rush begins with Jonathan Rhys Meyers (rock star) impregnating Keri Russell (classical cellist) during a one- off tryst in downtown New York. Nine months later Keri's implausibly evil father (he may as well wear a cape and twirl a moustache) spirits her baby off to an orphanage and tells mum the unfortunate creature has died. The lad is, in fact, destined to grow into a musical prodigy played by the unavoidable Freddie Highmore.
Early in his life, having failed to find adoptive parents, August - as he comes to be known - makes his way to New York
City where he falls in with a rock'n'roll child wrangler, played by the perennially unwelcome Robin Williams. Later, he encounters kindly evangelists and, eventually, some sympathetic folk at Juilliard Music School.
As you may have surmised, August Rush sees itself as a contemporary restaging of Oliver Twist. Actually, it sees itself as a lot of things: travelogue, love story, hyper-musical, magic realist fable. The film bounces around between so many forms, moods and genres that it proves impossible to get a handle on.
One senses the film-makers pleading with more cynical viewers (hello!) to open their hearts and allow this enchanted little creature some space to breathe. But the main problems do not lie with the film's undoubted sentimentality.
That would be endurable if there were some grounded reality to set against the magic. and if we got any sense that August was ever in proper peril. But Highmore, a talented actor, wanders through the picture with the unconcerned look of a golden child off whom bullets will bounce and from whom wolves will flee.
I suppose Mark Lester had the same aura about him in Oliver! That film did, however, feature the odd song you could hum.
