Sour notes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2015 (3841 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If this movie had been titled Choirboy instead of Boychoir, we might have expected something a little more zany, perhaps a raucous affair about a 11-year-old delinquent who corrupts the privileged goody-goodies at his private school.

Those elements are in place in Boychoir, but director François Girard (The Red Violin) maintains a tone of respectful awe in the cloistered realm of choral music, appropriate to the sublime singing therein.

Even so, there is the potential for deviltry in the central character, Stet (Garrett Wareing), born of the anger of having to live with a substance-abusing mom, and no dad in the picture.

When his mom dies, Stet finds himself finally meeting his biological father (Josh Lucas), a respectable Manhattan businessman who has been surreptitiously sending child-support cheques for years in an effort to keep his paternity a secret from his legitimate family.

At the behest of Stet’s school principal (Debra Winger), the boy finds himself transferred to a wealthy East Coast school, where he may find a place of his own. That is assuming he can get any acceptance from the mostly snooty student body, whose numbers include star soprano Devon (Joe West), who is unwilling to relinquish his exalted position at the top of the choirboy heap.

On the strength of his voice, Stet gets a teacher (Glee’s Kevin McHale) and a school administrator (Kathy Bates) on his side. Less easily impressed are Master Carvelle (Dustin Hoffman), the accomplished choirmaster, and his flinty assistant (Eddie Izzard).

Inevitably, Stet’s success hinges on the acceptance of Carvelle, an old-school educator who believes talent goes hand in hand with hard work and discipline.

It all bears a resemblance to the 2000 drama Billy Elliot, in which an 11-year-old from Northern England had to overcome prejudice to achieve his dream of becoming a dancer.

Of course, that film benefitted from some lively dancing. Boychoir is a vocal variant. Notwithstanding a few shots of some grand concert venues, this is the kind of movie that wouldn’t suffer too great a disservice to be consumed in “described video” format. (That might actually be a blessing, as Wareing doesn’t really look as tough as his character is intended to be.) Indeed, its soundtrack is its strongest asset.

So what we have is a movie that’s too classy to exploit its slob-vs.-snob premise, and too dry to allow a little anarchic joy to the mix.

That said, if you’re going to go with a classy approach, you might as well take advantage of actors like Hoffman, Bates and Izzard, who somehow manage to inject more youthful energy in the story than the kids in the foreground.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca