Mark Reviews Movies: WILD ROSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 20, 2019

A star isn't born in Wild Rose, because stardom is a dream, achieved only by the lucky few. Nicole Taylor's screenplay understands this reality, which makes every step of Rose-Lynn's (a commanding Jessie Buckley) journey toward success and fame as a country singer seem like a hard-fought battle that's almost guaranteed to be lost. The film isn't cynical or hopeless, though. It is just, as they say, the way it is.

Taylor provides an almost too-perfect rags-to-riches setup in the character, a young woman in Glasgow—Scotland, not Kentucky, just adding to the obstacles in the way of fulfilling her goal—who is released from prison after a "misunderstanding" involving a package of heroin. At 14, Rose-Lynn started singing semi-professionally at a local country bar, named after that Nashville-based radio staple the "Grand Ole Opry." Since then, she has become a mother twice before turning 18, hasn't had a place of her own to call home, and, now in her 20s, has been away from life for a year following the heroin incident.

We might think that we know the direction in which this story is headed, because we've seen this tale told before. The bright, shining star amidst the struggles of poverty or working-class life shines through to inevitable success, despite the unlikeliness of his or her circumstances. The movies are all about wish fulfillment in one way or another, so we want to see such stories play out in the expected way. This one dares to keep our expectations in check, because the world has a funny way of doing that, too.

This film, directed by Tom Harper, is all about the struggling, which is much more realistic than any rise-to-fame fantasy. The victories are small—seemingly meaningless in the big picture of wanting to become a country music star with hit records, lots of radio play, sold-out concerts at big venues, and everything else that comes with artistic, financial, and popular success. The defeats are small, too, if only because the odds are stacked against Rose-Lynn from the start. In such a situation, though, it's crushing to learn that, when one seems to be at rock bottom, there's another level below the one you're presently residing.

Rose-Lynn gets out of prison to find herself without a job and living with her mother Marion (Julie Walters), who has been raising her daughter Wynonna (Daisy Littlefield) and son Lyle (Adam Mitchell) for the past year. The kids barely know their mother as a mother, although Rose-Lynn doesn't much for the role anyway. As for work, the bar where she used to perform regularly has since formed a house band, and even if they were interested in having Rose-Lynn perform, she has to be home by 7 p.m., lest her ankle monitor alert the authorities. She's at a dead end.

Still with dreams of Nashville and fame, Rose-Lynn eventually gets a job cleaning the home of a wealthy family. With the salary, she gets her own apartment, and her children move in with her. She hires a solicitor, who contests the ankle monitor, giving the aspiring star a chance to perform live again. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), a wife and mother who owns the big house that Rose-Lynn cleans, discovers that her day worker is a talented singer, and with an altruistic desire to help some poor and unfortunate soul, she does some networking to get Rose-Lynn to meet some of the right people.

There's an obvious route for the story to take at this point, and it certainly seems to be heading in that direction, despite Rose-Lynn's tendency to doubt her luck and her ability to self-sabotage her opportunities—mostly through drinking (A trip to London to visit a radio DJ, arranged and paid for by her boss, is almost derailed because she loses her bag while having drinks with strangers on the train). If not for the reality of her character and behavior, Rose-Lynn might find that correct path toward stardom with slightly more ease.

That's not even mentioning the fact that she's a mother of two young children who need her, as well as the daughter of mother who is getting fed up with her inability to be responsible—both of which become the primary source of internal conflict. The necessities of trying to succeed as a performer are easier when one is free. Pretending to be free is much more difficult when other people are counting on you (Beyond the singing, Buckley's performance nails the complexity of this character—the fear, the uncertainty, the desire to at least appear like someone she isn't).

That's the rub of Rose-Lynn's situation—not talent or luck or knowing the right people or having the money to get started. It's responsibility. It's doubt. It's, well, life just getting in the way of what amounts to a fantasy. There's a section of this story, after everything has gone to hell and Rose-Lynn's life seems set to go in a certain direction, in which we get at least one last glimmer of hope. It's a lengthy sequence, which might be the sudden stroke of fortune in a more fantastically optimistic story, but instead, Taylor and Harper fill Rose-Lynn's adventures—in a place that she has dreamed about for years—with other dreamers, simply scraping by and waiting for something that probably will never come.

More often than not, that's the way these things go. The struggles matter. The fight matters more, and in putting the character, not the dream, at the center of the story, Wild Rose offers hope that Rose-Lynn discovers a real reason to fight.

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