Film Review: The Guitar

An interesting premise is weakened by directorial callowness, tonal uncertainty and an unengaging central performance.

David Noh

Nov 10, 2008, 10:56 AM ET

Remember those old weepies like Dark Victory and No Sad Songs for Me, in which the heroine learned in the first reel that she was dying and set about putting her life and affairs to rights? Well, The Guitar is the millennial version and, in a perhaps apt reflection of our age, instead of making sure that everyone around her will be all right, Melody (Saffron Burrows) adopts a me-me-me agenda wherein she transforms herself from mousily subservient office worker into a high-living would-be rock musician blithely living off every credit card she can lay her hands on.

Amos Poe’s script is based on an encounter he had with a friend who’d told him he’d beaten cancer by completely changing his life to the extent that the disease no longer recognized its “host body.” The same thing happens to Melody, but with the lifting of her death sentence comes an onslaught of bills racked up for gourmet food, a guitar and massive speakers, and the rent and furnishings for a spacious New York loft.

It’s a fascinating premise and the directorial debut of Amy Redford (daughter of Robert) has its moments, but her central character is not engaging enough to hold our interest. The casting of Saffron Burrows, a coldly competent but unexciting actress with a penchant for getting naked on film, doesn’t help matters. More should have been made of Melody’s life before she transforms—as it is, you barely sense a difference in her, apart from her more opulent accoutrements. There’s a bleak moroseness about this woman from her very first scene, and the dark cloud doesn’t lift as you watch her ordering expensive takeout and Vera Wang bedding with a methodical tortuousness. The other characters who enter her life—a black deliveryman (Isaach de Bankole, once more the ebony icon/stud muffin) and a lesbian pizza girl (toothy Paz de la Huerta), both of whom she becomes romantically involved with—are just mere empty accessories, like the fancy furniture and innumerable candles surrounding her. Flashbacks to Melody’s alienated childhood with the parents who wouldn’t give her a guitar are lame rather than enlightening.

With nothing to really capture the viewer’s interest, save that inevitable feeling that this house of cards is bound to crumble, the movie’s effect is soporific, and your eyes begin to grow very heavy, except when Melody talentlessly bangs away on her guitar, amplified to a deafening pitch by those speakers. What she really is, is the neighbor from hell, and it’s amazing that no one else in the building (which ironically is the real life Westbeth, a subsidized artists’ dwelling in Greenwich Village) ever seems to complain, taking the film to yet another remove from plausible reality. The risible casting of Janeane Garofalo as Melody’s doctor is particularly wacky, as if the film cannot make its mind up over just how much a black comedy it really wants to be.

Film Review: The Guitar

An interesting premise is weakened by directorial callowness, tonal uncertainty and an unengaging central performance.

David Noh

Nov 10, 2008, 10:56 AM ET