About one hour into “Wild Rose”, our heroine Rose Lynn gets up on stage to sing a cover of Emmylou Harris’ ‘Born to Run’. It’s a pivotal moment in her fight for stardom as she prepares for an amateur gig to showcase her country-singing talents. She quickly finds her groove, belting out Harris’ song for the itinerant in all of us. Just as the song is building up to the first chorus, which begins “Oh, I was born to run. To get ahead the rest. And all I wanted was to be the best,” we cut from her performance into a montage, which begins with a tired and beleaguered Rose Lynn clearing the table and watching her children play.
It’s a jarring cut, so at odds with the theme of the lyric. But that jarring cut is the centre of what “Wild Rose” is trying to say. That domestic scene cuts to a recurring moment in the montage that covers the song. As Rose continues to hone her singing, we watch her dropping her two young children off at various babysitters as she divides her time between maternal responsibilities and personal fulfilment. It’s the central dramatic crux of the film but director Tom Harper is deploying the montage here with such specificity and detail, it makes the Rose’s conflict even more difficult to watch. It’s the exact case of dissonance – the louder and more passionately Rose sings about her quest for freedom, the more the camera traps her tightly in the frame, her features diluted in a snapback pulled down. She’s singing the song but she’s not living it. She’s trapped between two worlds.
The musical drama, a British film set in Glasgow, Scotland, is about Rose Lynn Harlan, a personable but not too responsible young woman recently released from jail for a one-year minor drug charge. She returns home to take up responsibility of her children and also to tend to her dream of making it to Nashville to begin a country music career. Getting to Nashville is a must for her. “Who ever heard of a country singer from Scotland?” She asks the question mulishly early in the film. She’s a small-town-girl with big-city dreams just wanting to get out. It’s a familiar crisis for anyone who’s lived in any small town anywhere in the world and it’s that note of familiarity that’s immediately striking about “Wild Rose”.
The broad strokes of this story are very familiar. Rose is talented but fickle and irresponsible. Her mother is cautious about her dreams and is sceptical of the way she seems more full-throated in her desire for her dreams than in her desire to tend her children. A charming benefactor decides to help Rose achieve those dreams, but things must come to a head when lies are revealed and our star must decide what she wants to do with her life.
The fact that “Wild Rose” is built on such familiar limbs is the best proof that verve and sincerity can complement familiar tropes in the best of ways. “Wild Rose” is the fifth film about a budding starlet in the last twelve months, after “A Star is Born”, “Vox Lux”, “Teen Spirit”, and “Her Smell.” Each has presented new and interesting variations on the struggle of female stardom, but “Wild Rose” is my favourite. It’s as much about a quest for stardom as it is about the growing pains of maturity and about the tax on working mothers that will always affect career choices. It shirks any overt romantic plot and instead chooses to focus on relationships between women, whether maternal or otherwise. And, at the centre of the film, Jessie Buckley delivers an excellent performance as Rose. It is a role that that gives her a chance to show her wealth of talents. Rose Lynn is as much as chaotic in her wildness as she is compelling and charming in her rosy qualities and “Wild Rose”, as much as it suggests the familiar easy stories of achieving stardom, is clear-eyed about Rose at her best and her worst. In an early scene, a stranger asks her if she plans on having children, unaware of her home-life. “Yes,” she says wistfully. “But not now.” The line reading packs a punch as we know that Rose is telling a secret to us, the audience. There’s a part of her that resents her maternal responsibility. And it’s that maternal thread that gives the film its strongest power in an arc with Rose’s own mother, played by the formidable Julie Walters. Walter’s Marion is a sturdy limb for the family, providing stability for Rose’s children when their mother cannot, and for the film when the film is in danger of becoming too fanciful. The consistent disharmony between mother and daughter is not a text-book case of bitter-enemies but instead the script deepens and recontextualises the conflict, adding nuance to their dynamic in ways you don’t expect. By the time the film ends and Rose sings a line in her final song that name-checks her mother, the relationship has developed enough to be the film’s best asset.
“Wild Rose” is warm and delightful and hopeful in a way that feels like a balm for the worst of the world in 2019. But “Wild Rose” is also thoughtful and sad and a bit worn that feels apt for our contemporary struggles. It’s a brief 100 minutes and at first glance it feels too familiar to be particularly searing but it is. There’s so much depth in the film at the centre and on its edges, such as Sophie Okonedo riffing on the middle-class benefactor in a sharp performance, or the film’s subtle class commentary in a train scene where Rose travels from Scotland to London. Director Tom Harper lets the camera mirror the warmth of the film’s ethos. Rose’s Glasgow is a bit plain and often disjointed, but it’s shot with an air of naturalism that is inviting and cuts against any idea of artifice. “Wild Rose” is a charmer, but it doesn’t charm at the expense of intelligence. It marries its populist appeal to thoughtful social commentary. It’s one of the high-points of 2019 cinema.
Wild Rose is available to watch on AmazonInstant Video and will be available on DVD at the end of August.
