Ricki and the Flash

Here is a movie where we can only look at the screen and wonder what went wrong?  Here is a movie that features the talents of Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald in its cast, Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) in the director's chair, and Diablo Cody behind the screenplay.  All this talent has assembled behind Ricki and the Flash, and the only other question you have to ask besides what went wrong is why?

Ricki and the Flash is what happens when you assemble great talent, but nobody seems all that involved in the project.  Demme's direction is pedestrian, the screenplay is disjointed and padded, and the actors simply are not able to breathe life into their paper-thin characters.  Oh, the cast makes a valiant effort.  Streep does her own singing and even plays her own instruments as an aging rocker who is forced to face her family and her past.  And you can see potential in the movie in just about every scene.  But it never reaches the heights that you want it to.  It's dramatically inert, and it spends far too much time on the music, and not enough time on the characters.  We know that Streep can sing, and she sings wonderfully here too.  But in this case, her music grinds the story to a halt.  Every time we feel like we're getting close to these characters, the movie has her do an extended jam session that seems to stop the show (and not in a good way) and made me feel like I was watching an extended advertisement for the soundtrack album.

Streep plays Ricki Rendazzo, a woman who once dreamed of rock and roll fame, but in the present day is playing cover songs in a mostly empty bar.  She was married once and had a family.  Now all she has is a troubled relationship with one of her bandmates (former pop idol Rick Springfield) and a lousy day job working as a check out clerk in a supermarket.  She has so little money that she can't even afford her own hotel when she has to travel back home to be with her family.  Her trip home is inspired when her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) calls to tell her that their daughter, Julie (Streep's real-life daughter Mamie Gummer), has fallen into a deep depression after her husband left her for another woman.  When Ricki does return home, the situation is worse than she even thought, as it seems that Julie has attempted to kill herself recently, and basically looks like she hasn't cared about her appearance in weeks.

The drama is supposed to build around Ricki being reunited with her broken family.  Her former husband puts on a smile and a brave face, but seeing her again obviously hurts him.  And yet, there still seems to be some connection and love between them.  Her daughter Julie initially seems bitter at the very sight of her, and is still angry over how she left them to pursue her music dreams.  Ricki has two adult sons, neither of them seem to want anything to do with her.  One of them is planning to get married, but has not told her or is even planning to invite her to the wedding.  The other is completely standoffish with her because she never really accepted that he was gay in the past.  There's even Pete's current wife, Maureen (Audra McDonald), who has had to hold the family together ever since Ricki left.  This all sounds like more than enough human drama to build a story around, and yet Diablo Cody's screenplay treats all of this as mere speculation.  All of these relationships and problems are hinted at, but never truly addressed at any time.

Ricki and the Flash feels incomplete and underwritten, because these characters and their drama are never given the chance to truly be explored.  Problems and conflicts are constantly hinted at, but there is no resolution and no sense that the characters are honest or even genuine.  Everything is contrived and resolved too neatly, or not resolved at all.  About an hour into the movie, there is a very good scene where Ricki and Maureen confront each other and let a lot of things they've been holding in about each other for years out.  We expect for there to be some kind of follow up or resolution, but it never comes.  The two characters never really share the screen again until the very end, and even then, it's just to smile and wave at each other from across the room.  The scene that the two actresses have together is handled very well, but there needs to be a follow up.  Since we don't get one, the entire moment ends up feeling empty and unnecessary, and I don't think that should be the case.

Instead of actually exploring these characters and their personalities, the movie keeps on stopping itself so Streep can pick up a guitar and sing another classic rock song.  There actually seems to be a good chunk of the later half of the movie where the plot just drops out completely, and we just get one song after another for an extended period.  After this, the movie seems to be in a hurry to wrap itself up.  However, it doesn't even do that in a satisfying manner.  The family is reunited again and smiles at each other, but I kept on wondering, why are they happy again?  Nothing has really been resolved.  They share a few words together, but they're not the words they should be saying after everything that's happened.  Everything feels pat, tied up far too neatly, and okay when it really shouldn't be okay.  We haven't been through enough with these characters to earn the ending the movie wants to give us.

And oddly enough, despite all the screentime Streep gets in this movie, there's just so little that we know about Ricki.  We don't know who she really is, or even why she left her family.  We're just supposed to speculate.  We don't know why things went bad with her ex-husband, or even why they loved each other in the first place.  The movie seems to be trying to hint that there is still a connection between them, but we don't ever get to really see it.  As amazing of an actress as Streep is (and she is good here), she just can't create a character out of nothing, and that's precisely what the movie gives her.  Ricki more or less comes across as a blank slate who dresses in wild rocker clothes.  This leads us to wonder why the movie needed an actress of Streep's caliber to play her.  What drew her to this particular character?  Was there something in the script that got left out?

Ricki and the Flash is all the more disappointing because it's not really that bad of a movie.  You could see it working with a screenplay that was willing to truly explore these characters, or at least not plug them into an unconvincing dysfunctional family drama.  There's not a single moment that doesn't seem staged or contrived, and given the names that flash up on the screen during the opening credits, that's the last thing I was expecting.

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