“Music and Lyrics”
Director Marc Lawrence
warner bros. pictures
A 1980s-style music video, complete with tight pants, mullets and lame special effects, plays at the opening credits of “Music and Lyrics” and again at the closing credits.
This too-cheesy-to-be-true music video gets the audience laughing right from the start and giggling again on the way out, which can be a difficult feat for romantic comedies, which often delve too much into the emotional hang-ups of the characters and forget to be funny.
But “Music and Lyrics,” starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, remembers to include both humor and issues, and when the script can’t be bothered to deal with either, musical interludes step in to give the narrative a break.
The opening video is “Pop Goes My Heart,” a hit song from a fictional 1980s British pop group called Pop. Alex Fletcher (Grant), the only Pop member to continue on to a successful solo career, now performs old hits at theme parks and high school reunions across small-town America.
He’s happy living in his former glory.
So when he gets the chance for some new glory, he almost chickens out. The chance comes from new music sensation Cora Corman, a huge fan of Alex’s who wants him to write her a new song by the end of the week. Alex is good with creating melodies, but he can’t write meaningful lyrics.
The situation looks hopeless. But everything changes when the woman who waters his indoor plants gets sick and sends her friend Sophie Fisher (Barrymore) to flick around the watering can instead. The “meet cute” comes off as about as contrived as it sounds. Unbelievable coincidence is again written off as fate when Sophie absentmindedly starts humming lyrics to Alex’s piano tunes, because as it turns out, Sophie is secretly an aspiring writer.
Since most of the film is spent writing a song, the music in “Music and Lyrics” becomes an essential part of the film. But unlike a musical, it doesn’t advance the plot.
However, the songs surprisingly help the film by being a few minutes of something the audience has never heard before.
Despite the songs, “Music and Lyrics” is nothing new. We’ve seen Grant and Barrymore in other romantic comedies so we know all about their characters already. Barrymore is an inspired yet lost free spirit, but her cheerful exterior covers deep emotional wounds. And Grant’s character is English and polite with only one dance move up his sleeve (a trademark hip thrust that was more comic in “Love Actually”).
“Music and Lyrics,” in fact, is a lot like the terrible pop routines Grant performs; we’ve seen it all before, we know it’s bad, but the cheerfulness is catchy.
E-mail Crocker at acrocker@media.ucla.edu.