Movie review: Boychoir sings same old song

By Jay Stone

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a kid from strained circumstances (poverty, drunken mom) discovers he has a great singing talent, goes to a fancy school filled with snobby prodigies who have lots of money but couldn’t hit a high D to save their lives, and becomes the great hope for the big important concert that the fancy school has never before managed to get to. Can our hero be the one who takes them there, on the wings of an angelic voice — although, frankly, some of us find those pre-pubescent boy soprano tones to be slightly creepy in a castrato kind of way — and sheer gumption?

Stop me, but you won’t stop Francois Girard, the Canadian director of music movies (Red Violin 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould), or screenwriter Ben Ripley (Source Code), the talent behind Boychoir, the film with all that and more. They not only pull out all the stops, but also add a few new ones so they can pull them out later. Boychoir has everything except the speech where someone says, “You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a cliché,” or however it goes.

It stars the pouty Garrett Wareing as Stet — one of the few movie heroes named after a proofreading notation — who is an angry 11-year-old with a sweet but untrained voice. When his mom dies in typically tawdry fashion, he’s taken by his father, who can’t acknowledge his parenthood on account of the fact that Stet is the product of an extramarital affair, like some foundling in a Victorian melodrama. Seeking to assuage his guilt, dad drops him off at the American Boychoir School, a rich private school on a lush estate, which could actually exist for all I know. There, a bunch of fairly simpy looking kids study diminished sevenths and the like, and imagine themselves to be rock stars of the cantata.

Stet is not welcomed, but his natural talent persuades Mr. Carvelle (Dustin Hoffman) to give him a chance. Mr. Carvelle is meant to be a distant perfectionist to whom the group comes first — there’s no “i” in choir. Wait a minute. There is — but Hoffman’s natural warmth transforms him into something at once more interesting and less authentic. It’s hard to know what he is, exactly: like many characters in Boychoir he changes at the convenience of the script, and he is alternately nurturing, angry, uninvolved, and halfway down Stet’s voice box, checking the manufacture of his vocal chords.

The other students are at first suspicious, then impressed by the beautiful tones of this mysterious new choir member, then suspicious again as several plotlines fall across Stet’s path to glory. These include his father, whose New York family is all gung ho about the chance to go to New Haven, Conn., to hear adolescent boys sing — not enough music in the Big Apple? — as well as Mr. Carvelle’s rival (Eddie Izzard) who doesn’t believe in Stet’s raw talent, and the school principal (Kathy Bates, in the film’s most sensible performance) who does.

There’s not much mystery as to how this will end, especially not with people talking about this new boy who’s “what we’ve been waiting for” and exclaiming to each other “He can go all the way,” even as Stet struggles to come to terms with both his dubious provenance and the fact that he can’t actually read music. Boychoir’s many reversals will be familiar to fans of last year’s Whiplash, which was the dark and searing version of exactly this movie. It was also about a musical triumph, but one that turns to ashes in the mouth. Boychoir aims to have you cheering or, in some cases, shaking your head.

jeffreyjaystone@gmail.com

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