FLORA AND SON - Mark Reviews Movies

Flora and Son, Apple Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 21, 2023

There might not be a working filmmaker who loves and thrives on music more than John Carney. Flora and Son, the writer/director's latest, continues his affection for and obsession with music as a way of creating, bonding, and healing, telling the story of some people in search of purpose and meaning who gradually find it in song.

Carney's screenplay is a bit too narratively disjointed to reach the emotional highs he's clearly reaching for with this tale, but when it gets at some truth about music and these characters and their relationships, that shortcoming almost doesn't matter. The film achieves that insight more often than it stumbles with or misses some point, although the highs are so joyous that the missteps feel more significant than they might otherwise.

Obviously, the story here revolves around Flora (Eve Hewson), a woman of about 30 living in Dublin, and her 12-year-old son Max (Orén Kinlan), who is—as some might put it politely—a bit of a problem child. The kid has a penchant for petty theft, a hobby that has gotten him into a police-run program for at-risk youth. After the boy's most recent bit of shoplifting, the local police contact (played by Don Wycherley) keeping tabs on Max lets him and Flora know that the boy has one strike left, before it'll be impossible to keep Max out of court and probably a juvenile detention facility.

A few things are worth noting about these two. First, neither Flora nor her son are particularly sympathetic at first. That's partly because they seem to outright hate each other, and it's a testament to Hewson's inherent charm and her willingness to make Flora so self-involved, so apathetic toward anyone else, and so authentically complex that we at least understand the character and why she is the way she is. Yes, she treats Max terribly (A slap near the beginning of the film is so sudden and edited so jarringly that it comes across as more violent than it probably is), which means we also understand why the kid has as many problems as he does. What else, though, can this essentially single mother, who never had much of a life or a chance to grow up herself, do?

She's still technically married to Max's father, her high-school sweetheart, Ian (Jack Reynor), but they live in separate homes, split custody of the boy, and are just amicable enough that their relationship has become a form of jovial, joking bitterness. Ian was once a professional musician with a potentially bright future ahead of him, but he dropped that career to try to be a father and, even after the split, hasn't found his way back to it. For all their troubles and personality—to put it generously in some ways—quirks, these are decent people deep down, and that becomes increasingly apparent as the story unfolds.

It becomes surprisingly sweet, too, considering how the tale starts. Flora finds an acoustic guitar in the garbage, pays to have it repaired, and gives it to Max as a day-late birthday present. He's more into electronic music, though, so because she paid for it and kind of out of spite, Flora decides to learn to play, with the hope that maybe it'll get people to notice and accept her. She starts taking lessons online from Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a laid-back musician in Los Angeles who has become pragmatic about his chances of becoming successful or famous one day.

What follows in the narrative, then, is more a series of ideas, revolving around these broken or new relationships, than a straightforward plot of any kind. Because the characters are so strongly established and developed, though, the prospect and execution of that approach is quite engaging.

That's especially true of the long-distance student-teacher connection between Flora and Jeff. She may start her lessons tipsy and flirty, making the easily charming teacher to cut the first one short, but then, the bond and the film itself starts to solidify. It's all about music—what it could mean to Flora, what it does mean to Jeff, how it opens up worlds of creativity and emotion in such simple and universal ways, how it literally eliminates the distance between the two.

The character work of Carney's script is thoughtful and detailed, but it's when these two talk about music—from the basics of chords, to the way different techniques of playing only three chords can change the entire tenor of a song, to the purely romantic notion of a lifetime of rewards that playing an instrument can bring—that the experience of the film becomes almost transcendent. Jeff has a speech about owning a chord that is genuine and, because of the writing and Gordon-Levitt's achingly sincere performance, genuinely moving.

The other key relationship, of course, is the one of the title, and unfortunately, it takes its time to reveal itself. When it does, though, all of those lessons and all of that admiration for the power of music reveal themselves in the way Flora and Max find a different, more productive, and more loving tone to their relationship. That rejuvenated bond is affecting, too, albeit in a distinct way.

In juggling so much, though, Carney does eventually lose or misdirect certain threads and relationships here, especially when it comes to Ian, whose status as a third wheel almost becomes a joke by the climax, and in what is left for Jeff in this story as soon as the mother-son bond overtakes the teacher's with his student. It feels false that Flora and Son tries to contrive a bittersweet romance out of that, particularly when the film already gives us two potentially or real great loves: that between a mother and son and, even more on filmmaker's mind, of the seemingly endless possibilities of music.

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