Direction: Tom Harper
Country: UK
Set in Glasgow, this heartfelt, if rudimentary, story about an aspiring country singer was played in a minor key for my ears. Jessie Buckley (Beast) is Rose-Lynn Harlan, a single mother of two, whose dream is to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and become what she thinks she was born to be: a country singer. She firmly believes she should have been born in America.
After spending 12 months in jail for attempting to smuggle heroin, Rose finds her place taken in the local bar band she was regularly performing. She is forced to take a full-time job as a housekeeper, working for a generous, wealthy woman called Susannah (Sophie Okonedo). It just so happens that the latter has the right connections to provide Rose with an opportunity to sing at London’s BBC Radio 1. A bumpy train ride almost thwarted the visit that served to teach this go-getter something important. It was put like this: “you have the voice, but what do you have to say to the world?”
In addition to all this, Rose does the best she knows to take good care of her estranged children and be in good terms with her critical mother, Marion (Julie Walters).
With all the doubts and emotional confrontations, Rose makes a decision, with the movie evolving into a typical melodrama pinched by a varnished production that removes everything it had created raw and rustic. The combination of rough edges and polished surfaces rarely produced satisfactory results here. This strategical tonal contrast leaned on the formulaic and ended up as a crowd-pleaser.
The film isn’t all bad and Buckley’s onscreen presence is significant; however, it just didn’t work out as an emotionally resonant tale, with director Tom Harper and writer Nicole Taylor playing the easiest notes without risking something outside the scale. Wild Rose gives a perfect example of a fascinating start that gradually loses potentiality, failing to make a splash in the last instance.
