Delayed Reaction: Wild Rose

Premise: A Scottish woman, just released from prison, pursues her dream of becoming a Country singer.

I'm not a fan of this kind of movie. A self-sabotaging person relies on the patience and kindness of those around her to slowly reach some personal growth. I just don't have much sympathy for those characters. I rarely find them as likable or compelling as the filmmakers do. Sherrybaby is another example of this. Half Nelson too, although the part of that movie about Ryan Gosling's student did soften my stance on that movie overall. I remember being more favorable about Smashed, but that mainly had to do with Mary Elizabeth Winstead's performance. So, Wild Rose came in with a lot working against it in my eyes.

Wild Rose isn't the first movie to win me over with a song. Don't get me wrong. I liked other things about it. This is a nice breakout role for Jessie Buckley, who is already on her way to becoming a star. The film is thoughtful and small in a lot of good ways. But, really, it's the climactic song - "Glasgow (No Place Like Home)" - that made it all worth it. That's a great song for that movie. It fits perfectly and retroactively makes more of the movie worth it.

A small side rant: The Oscars need to find a way to make sure that songs like this get nominated. This year's actual Original Song nominees were pretty pitiful. The Harriet song only worked because Cynthia Erivo sang it. It's a joke that it got to a point where they were nominating the forgettable songs from Toy Story 4 and Breakthrough. The song from Rocketman was pretty unremarkable too. Only Frozen II's "Into the Unknown" had any significance to the movie it was in. I know that the Academy's rules can make it hard to find eligible songs sometimes, but "Glasgow (No Place Like Home)" was eligible. The category is fundamentally broken if more songs like it can't sneak into the nominee list.

As I began this post saying though, I wasn't a huge fan of the movie overall. Buckley's character spends most of the movie disappointed that she's being held responsible for past mistakes. Then, the world starts bowing to her wishes. As a mediocre maid, she stumbles onto an employer who gets invested in her country singing dream. When that falls apart, her mother just has a bag of money to hand over so she can leave her kids again and go to Nashville. I guess it's nice that she decides to come back at the end, but I really wasn't even rooting for her until there were about 10 minutes left in the movie.

This all is my way of saying that Wild Rose is a pretty good movie that personally didn't work for me...except for the song. That's a banger.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend