Frustrating Filmographies #2: Wes Craven

FRUSTRATING FILMOGRAPHIES #2

john cribbs

wes craven's MUSIC OF THE HEART

This is an experiment I've been mulling over for some time. It's dedicated to great directors. Great directors...who've transgressed. Disappointed. Befuddled. But not to the point of being written off entirely. In the course of long careers these filmmakers have made the occasional slip, and the intent behind this ongoing column will be to try and figure out what their motivation might have been in choosing projects that proved questionable, wrongheaded or outright embarrassing. The purpose of this experiment is not to deride, but to understand.

The subject: Wes Craven

The movie: Music of the Heart

It was exactly 10 years ago this very date – October 29, 1999, a cold, depraved introduction to the Halloween weekend – that an ungodly terror was released upon an unsuspecting world. The bows of hell were raised, the strings of terror were plucked, and a group of precocious inner-city kids learned the meaning of music and of life in the heartwarming Miramax production Music of the Heart.

Hey wait a minute – what the hell? John you promised us a week of horror movies! Now you're reviewing some teacher-inspiring-inner-city-school kids Meryl Streep violin-playin Hollywood bullshit? Hey don't blame me. Blame Mr. Wes Craven, the subject of this week's very scary "Frustrating Filmographies."

Craven, of course, is the iconic director behind such modern horror classics as Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He's best known as the creator of dream serial killer Freddy Kruger from the seven-film Nightmare on Elm Street series, of which he directed the bookend chapters. With a well-established reputation as a master of modern horror (like John Carpenter, he saw various movies released with the possessive "Wes Craven's" tag above the title) he managed to reach a new generation of fans by helming Kevin Williamson's Scream movies, the first of which was released in 1996. And although that trilogy's self-aware, post-modern take on scary movies and the "slasher formula" revitalized the popularity of a genre that had been more or less relegated to video store distribution in the course of that terrible decade, their snarky satirical tone and rampant in-jokes were a far cry from the genuinely disturbing thrills of the director's earlier work. Then came Music of the Heart.

Music of the Heart is the enriching tale of a recently-separated mother of two who lands a job teaching the violin to students at an East Harlem elementary school. She helps the kids learn to appreciate the beauty and power of music until one day she wanders into the basement looking for a music stand or something and discovers a horde of mutant creatures living under the school's foundation, products of an incestuous relationship between the principal and the janitor! The mutants escape and terrorize the campus, mauling and munching on students and faculty alike. The teacher and her remaining pupils are forced to fall back on their primal survival instincts until someone realizes the power of their violin-playing can lull the rampaging monsters back to their resting place. They trick the creatures into a beautifully-scored, hypnotizing march back to the basement and seal the entrance forever, but an eerie light beneath the door suggests this is far from over. There will probably be a sequel, possibly featuring a dog POV.

Ok, technically only the first sentence of that summary accurately describes the final cut of the movie (after several script changes no doubt). There are no underground abominations, only the open hearts and minds of doe-eyed children eager to be motivated to greatness! Like Last House on the Left, the film has a lot of alternative titles – well actually just two, 50 Violins and Fiddlefest; the teacher starts her first class using 50 violins she purchased in Greece and ends up holding a fundraising concert called "Fiddlefest" at Carnegie Hall when the school board threatens to eliminate her program due to budget cuts. Those titles, and the film, are inspired by the true story of Roberta Guaspari, founder of the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music and subject of the independent 1995 documentary Small Wonders. Small Wonders was bought and released by Miramax, and touted as "the real Mr. Holland's Opus," which leads me to question what Music of the Heart would be considered. The fake Small Wonders? A female version of Mr. Holland's Opus? Or some deformed patchwork beast made up of the two films, one that has to be brought down in a hail of bullets once it starts rampaging, relentlessly spreading its positive messages all over town?

Mr. Holland's Opus was roundly ridiculed in 1995 for being not only an overly sentimental story about an Inspirational Teacher à la Dead Poets Society, but also being an overly sentimental story about an Inspirational Musician (think: Shine, The Soloist), thus effectively combining the two hokiest of subgenres. The script for Music of the Heart takes that one step further by portraying a character who is both an Inspirational Musician and the Inspirational Teacher to Underprivileged Kids, a character based on a real person. Hollywood had already tapped the Underprivileged, Inner-city Kid well with films like Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me and Dangerous Minds, but in their desperation to recapture the Oscar glory of the previous year the Weinstein brothers wolfed down the Small Wonders documentary and regurgitated it as an award-baiting story of one woman's struggle to awaken the beauty in the souls of her students and, ultimately, herself. The only thing left was who to hire as director, a decision that must have been made like this: "We're looking at a release Halloween weekend. Whose films usually do pretty well around that time?"

Well, technically that's not what happened. Craven allegedly informed the Weinsteins he'd only direct the next Scream movie if he was allowed to do this one first. His ultimatum isn't actually that shocking: he had obviously been trying to distance himself from the genre since the mid-90's. Before Scream he made Vampire in Brooklyn, an Eddie Murphy vehicle that attempted to transition from horror to comedy and ended up failing in both departments. The Scream movies themselves, aside from having a deliberate playfulness to them, have a detached feel that suggests the once straight-faced horror auteur was purposely indulging in self-parody. And 1999, the same year of Heart's debut, saw the release of Craven's novel Fountain Society, a thriller about cloning and government conspiracies that reads more like an "X-Files" episode than a Stephen King book. Still, no fan of Craven's saw Music of the Heart coming. It wasn't just a departure: it was as perplexing a move as if Penny Marshall had announced her next project would be a Hellraiser sequel. Not only was it a departure from the genre he was known for revolutionizing, it dealt with a subject as removed from Craven's previous work as Anne Ramsey's head was from her body in the memorable basketball sequence in Deadly Friend.

Madonna was the original star to spearhead this vanity project but was Swept Away, citing "creative differences," so Craven and the Weinsteins went with The Next Best Thing and cast Meryl Streep, the mascot for overrated actors. It was a brave thing for Streep to do… I don't know why, but that's the kind of thing all those Actor's Studio types are always telling her so why not. By the way from here on I'm going to be referring to the character as "Meryl" rather than "Roberta" because when Meryl Streep acts I don't see a character, only Meryl Streep.

Her character in the film is an amalgam of various types from those previously mentioned movies. She's got the irreverently harsh manner/tough love approach of Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, she's the same kind of influential yet flawed educator as Mr. Holland and lovable fish-out-of-water as Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. The kids initially reject her approach (sort of – more on that later) then eventually stand up for her when she's about to be lose her job, just like the members of Dead Poets Society. In other words she's as standard as this kind of character comes, a cut and paste job with one huge, original twist on the formula… she plays the violin!

"How do you expect to reach these kids?"
"With…this!"
"A violin? You must be crazy to think a violin can serve as a portal to the untapped potential of these disadvantaged kids! Crazy, I say!"

That's not exact dialogue from the movie but it's fairly representative of the first thirty minutes or so, with variations on the same theme repeated throughout the first hour. The rest of the cast is made up of one-dimensional characters either in support or opposition of her crazy-teacher ways. Gloria Estefan, whose most impressive film credit up to that time was having one of Miami Sound Machine's songs on the Cobra soundtrack, makes her acting debut as one of the pro-nutty violin teacher staff members. Playing the best friend with ostensibly one scene worth of dialogue didn't inspire her to pursue further filmwork – she hasn't appeared in a feature since (but it's only been ten years, maybe she's holding out for the right project). Angela Bassett, appearing as the principal who's on the fence about all this violin business, claims on the DVD documentary that she's worked with Craven "twice" before, but so far as I can tell he's only directed her in Vampire in Brooklyn. She was in Innocent Blood – is she confusing him with John Landis? Or Critters 4 director Rupert Harvey? Does she think Craven directed How Stella Got Her Groove Back?* Anyway Bassett plays the part like an angry chief in a cop movie, constantly telling Streep "get in my office!" and reading her the riot act for her showboating, maverick teacher antics. And Cloris Leachman pops up now and then as the sassy, casually racist grandma who tells it like it is.

* To clear that up, Craven was executive producer of the TV show "Nightmare Cafe," which Bassett appeared on. But she was only directed by Craven once previous to this film.

(continued on page 2 of Frustrating Filmographies #2: Wes Craven's Music of the Heart)

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