Movie Review: Flora and Son
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
While teaching his pupil how to play guitar in Flora and Son, a music instructor explains that writing a song doesn’t come down to how many chords one knows as much as how those chords are used. It could very easily be a metaphor for the career of writer/director John Carney.
Since 2007’s Once, Carney has specialized in stories about music’s power to connect and heal. It’s a theme present throughout the majority of his filmography, even if the tone and subject vary. From the scrappy, no-budget Once to the joyful period piece Sing Street (2016), no other filmmaker has been as curious about music’s power to transform. Carney returns to those themes in Flora and Son, a comedy-drama about a single mother, her son and a guitar. And he proves again that few directors understand how to use music and songwriting to tackle ideas of connection and self-actualization better than he does.
Flora (Eve Hewson) is a screw-up. Living in a depressing corner of Dublin, she’s a single mother who spends her evenings bringing home strangers from the bar and not paying much attention to whether her teenage son, Max (Oren Kinlan), is at school or getting in trouble with the police. She’s divorced from Max’s father, Ian (Jack Reynor), a former musician who spends his days getting high and playing video games. When she forgets Max’s birthday, she tries to make amends by gifting him a guitar she has found in the trash. When he rejects it, Flora decides to learn how to play, taking lessons from Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who teaches her online from California.
If you’ve seen any of Carney’s other films, you can probably guess where this is going. There are no bonus points for predicting whether Flora becomes a better person through music or whether her newfound love of the guitar will provide a connection point with Max, an aspiring rapper. And it only takes one flirtatious lesson between Flora and Jeff to know that there will be more between them than a teacher-pupil relationship. And if you get the feeling this is all heading toward a cheer-eliciting musical finale, you’re not wrong. This is Carney playing the hits.
But they’re the hits because Carney is so good at this, and Flora and Son is another winning story about personal and instrumental harmony from someone who does this better than anyone.
Hewson, the daughter of U2 front man Bono, is solid as the adrift and cynical Flora, whose anger and humor keep people from getting too close and protect her from the sinking feeling that the good life she always thought was waiting might not be coming. Flora’s a bad friend, a bad mother and a bad employee (she steals from the woman she babysits for). Through music, she begins to understand herself better and how to express her discontent, frustrations, and desires. A scene where the camera is fixed on Hewson as Flora watches a video of Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now” should be cliché and hackneyed, but Hewson is too good at capturing the way a song can arrest someone and break down their defenses. She has a natural humor, and is also strong in the scenes where she has to wrestle with her relationships to others.
That includes Jeff, the instructor who is initially frustrated by his smart-ass pupil and then won over by her forthrightness and excitement. Although the two are an ocean apart, Carney uses a stylistic device to make it seem they’re in the same room, and some of the film’s best sequences simply observe Jeff and Flora staying up late to discuss the power of a song or trade notes on a verse. Gordon-Levitt’s natural charisma helps these scenes, although the romance that blossoms feels a little too easy and too good to be true – which would be a flaw were Carney not savvy enough to know that a love story isn’t what Flora needs, and is possibly just another distraction from reality.
The relationship between Flora and Max, as the film’s title suggests, is the heart of the film, and the film’s strongest moments come from watching Hewson and Kinlan together. Their fighting isn’t playful bickering; it’s harsh and mean, and it captures the sheer exhaustion and frustration of parenting. But as the two connect, their relationship begins to heal. Carney never puts too fine a point on it and doesn’t give into the temptation to toss in one too many plot complications or moments of emotional grandstanding. Rather, the way Flora and Max begin to talk about music and form a tentative truce feels organic and true, and the movie honestly portrays what it feels like for a parent to realize their kid is their own separate, but fascinating, individual.
Orén Kinlan and Eve Hewson in “Flora and Son.”
Reynor, who was so great in Carney’s Sing Street, is pushed a bit to the side, but that’s how Ian’s positioned himself. Reynor plays the character as a self-involved screwup, fixated on the dreams that got away from him – he mentions several times that his band was set to open for Snow Patrol when he threw it all away to hook up with Flora. But he’s also not portrayed as a villain. Ian is also impacted by Flora’s newfound maturity and Max’s passion, and his begrudging participation in that leads to some gentle humor throughout the film as this broken family tries to find a way to make their situation work.
Again, the description might sound rote, but Carney is simply very skilled at capturing connections and exploring the colliding emotions of flawed characters. It also helps that the film is powered by a soundtrack of catchy original songs written by the director. Some of these are tossed-off acoustic jams like the ones Jeff creates, but the film also has a joyful interlude where Flora and Max make a music video to impress a crush. The film ends with a show-stopping number that manages to include all of the film’s main characters, and the power anthem will likely send audiences out on a high note.
Flora and Son might be missing the raw intimacy of Once or the fun flights of fantasy behind Sing Street’s music videos. And it’s a tad too overwritten; for the first time, you can start to see the formula poking out. Those elements might keep the film from being a masterpiece on par with Carney’s other works, but it’s still a funny, touching and crowd-pleasing story. As long as Carney wants to keep cranking out these different variations on this theme, I’ll show up to listen.
