Ricki and
the Flash
(2015)
(SPOILERS) Well,
Meryl can belt out a tune. And her daughter’s a chip off the old block. And
Rick Springfield can emote with the best of them. And Kevin Kline’s the same
charmer he always was, but possibly more likeable with a few years on him.
Otherwise, though, Ricki and the Flash
is an undemanding, trivial trifle, a tepid parody of the attitudinal pictures
Jonathan Demme was making in the ‘80s.
So much so,
Ricki makes Rachel Getting Married look edgy (and what’s Demme’s current fixation
with wedding movies?) One can only conclude the (deserved) success of The Silence of the Lambs deflated the
director’s taste in truly offbeat material, as his features since, in one way
or another, have evidenced a filmmaker who has lost his way, normalised, forgotten
what he’s about, in order to be kind-of engulfed by the Hollywood deep end. That
may explain why he’s done so little in the fiction arena in the last decade,
concentrating mainly on documentary work.
Ricki and the Flash finds Streep and Kline reuniting for the first
time since the wretched Sophie’s Choice
(remember the ‘80s, the decade where Meryl seemed to have a permanently drippy
nose and eccentrically pronounced accent?), although they were later scheduled
to co-star in Death Becomes Her, and their
easy chemistry shines through. But Ricki’s an unlikely character, an aging rock
chick living an alternative lifestyle on the back of working a supermarket
checkout, prone to voicing ultra-conservative sentiments on race, gender and
the merits of the Bush family, with a rich ex (and ex-family) from whom she’s
entirely estranged. If it weren’t for Streep’s grounding presence, we wouldn’t
be buying this for a second. And even then…
As such,
both Diablo Cody’s Juno and Young Adult, this forming a “three ages
of woman” trilogy of sorts, come from a more coherent and well-conceived place.
The attempted suicide of Ricki’s daughter finds Kline’s Pete inviting his
former wife down for a spot of crisis counselling, as unlikely as that seems. The
interaction between Streep, Kline and Mamie Gummer (Julie) is the highlight of
the picture, even as it traverses such essential tropes as getting stoned, having
a makeover, and encountering Julie’s duplicitous husband. And Pete’s current
wife (Audra McDonald), with whom there is, of course, friction. And the gay son
and the other one who is getting married (Nick Westrate and Sebastian Stan,
neither of whom make much impression).
Somehow,
despite herself, Ricki ends up invited to the wedding, where she proceeds to
impose herself on the assembly with an impromptu Bruce Springfield number, and isn’t rewarded with eternal opprobrium. Demme
and Cody have configured a bizarre wish-fulfilment ending, one where everything
appears to turn out well, a shameless embrace of acceptance and inclusivity, despite
having absolutely no reason for the story to go that way (even Julie no longer
seems about to top herself). It must be the power of The Boss. This is one of
those pictures where you stick with it due to the talent involved, but have
absolutely no idea what enticed them in the first place.
