Raise Your Voice
Review by David Bjerre
Genre: GirlieTalk
Keywords:
Singing, Running Away From Home, Death in the Family.
Did you know that...
Hilary Duff's favorite color is pink. Or blue.
INTRODUCTION
She can sing, she can dance, she can act. Hilary Duff does it all. Except one thing. She does not, under any circumstances, offend.
THE STORY
Terri is a young upstanding girl from the small town of Flagstaff. She loves to sing and she's been doing so since she was a kid. She even writes her own lyrics and her big dream is to get enrolled in the summer program at the prestigious Bristol Hillman music school in LA, three weeks of intense voice coaching and musical training.
However, her overprotective redneck father, Simon (David Keith), will have none of this. He's convinced that she'll be impregnated and hooked on drugs the moment she sets foot in the city of sin. She's his baby, and he's not about to let her out of his sight. He forbids her to go. But then her rebellious older brother, Paul, takes matters into his own hands. He films her singing, makes a DVD out of the footage and sends it to the music school.
That same night Terri and Paul sneak out to go to a concert. As they drive home, their car is hit by a drunk driver. When Terri wakes up in the hospital she's told that her brother is dead. Beleaguered by guilt she puts all her dreams of singing on hold.
And then the letter comes: She's been accepted into the program.
Her mother and her Aunt Nina convince her that she should go in spite of her father's wishes, and they cook up a clever scheme, which would allow her to attend the school, while her father thinks she's staying with Nina. Terri is not comfortable with lying to her father (it's the first time, you know), but her brother's last wish seems to trump that, so without further ado, she's off to LA.
Terri is the odd girl out, but she quickly makes friends with the cool Jay (Oliver James from "What a Girl Wants"), who helps her get settled in. The other students are very talented and fiercely competitive and Terri is facing a tough couple of weeks. Doubt and guilt race through her mind as she's trying to keep up with her fellow students. Can Terri ever get past her brother's death and start to enjoy singing again? And what will her father do, when he discovers her deceit?
REVIEW
This tale of a gifted young girl who tries to realise her dreams, despite opposition from her family and a rough beating from the world, makes for a sweet, naive, not too irrelevant film. It may never rise above the inherent predictability of the genre, and it may have little to offer uninitiated viewers, but for those who seek out this type of guilty pleasure, it should be more than adequate for a little O.D. on warm & fuzzy.
"Raise Your Voice" takes place in an alternate reality that merges actual problems with fantasy solutions. Terri's guilt and subsequent stage fright seem like logical consequences of her brother's death, but the way she overcomes these troubles is straight out of a glittery, cheesy teen magazine about horses. This is the kind of film where an impromptu jam session on the front steps of the school explodes and turn into an all-out concert performance. Suddenly every kid in the vicinity pulls out an instrument and plays along to an improvised tune, which sounds suspiciously like they've played it a million times before.
The whole set-up with Terri's family - everyone fit snugly into their own little stereotype - is the hardest part to swallow, but once Terri leaves home and arrives at the school, the film really comes alive. Enter John Corbett as the rebellious (he wears leather pants) teacher, Mr. Torvald, who inspires Terri to step up and be all that she can be. For this part he's adopted a sort of Jeff Bridges "The Dude" look, with long hair and an unruly beard. He steals every single scene he gets near, and fires up one OTT line after another with deadly precision, causing most of the kids to appear slightly shell-shocked when they share a scene with him.
At school Terri is surrounded by a host of quirky characters. There's the previously mentioned Jay, the cool guy, whose only qualification for that label seem to be his outrageous hairstyle. There's also the struggling black violin player and the nerdy computer kid, who's secretly in love with the reclusive and obsessed pianist. Oh, and to add a bit of drama, we need a queen bitch, which we get in the "shape" of Robin, who dated Jay last summer and can't quite let him go.
These characters are every bit as stereotypical as everything else in the film, but for some reason the bonding between them actually works very well. Maybe it's because the film gets a little more crazy and inventive when it gets a chance to mix these guys up.
But of course, there's only one star in this movie. Hilary Duff, what can I say? If there's a girl more squeakily clean and politically correct than her, I'd be surprised. "Raise Your Voice" is a perfect vehicle for her if she wants to hold on to that image. Terri says stuff like "oh, my gosh", she wears lip gloss to bed and her parents call her Terri Boo-Berrie (really)! Okay, so she does defy her father's wishes and lies to him, but the film removes any potential moral conflict, by making the father's wishes so preposterously unfair that it's never an issue if he's wrong, which of course allows Duff to keep her path clean. We can't very well have "out-of-control teenager" on her résumé, can we?
Nothing is spared in the full-on finale, where Duff and Oliver James perform the number "Someone's Watching Over Me" in its entirety, in front of the whole school. Her father shows up in the middle of everything (no points for guessing if he realises the error of his ways), and when it's all over, everyone gathers at the school steps for yet another jam session.
There's something almost criminally enjoyable about this film, as long as you know what you're getting yourself into. It hardly comes as a surprise that there's very little bite in the story. The film vaporises all of Terrie's problems to the tune of politically correct pop music ("Believe in yourself and you'll fly... high"), and we get the sense that if it could make her brother reappear, with a magic wand or something, it would. But that's what you get when you hook up with Miss Duff, so take it or leave it, and if you decide to "take it", don't tell anyone about it. Instead, pull the shades down and indulge yourself in this guilty pleasure. You'll be treated to a fantasy world like no other.
The kind of world where "sorry" really does fix everything.
