Ricki and the Flash
Director: Jonathan Demme
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer
Duration: 101 mins
Class: 12
KRS Releasing Ltd
There are a couple of predictabilities in Ricki and the Flash. Most glaringly obvious is that Meryl Streep excels. At 66, she plays an aging rock musician trying to reconnect with the family she abandoned years ago and, like most of her output in her 40-odd year career, Streep pulls it off with her usual effortless aplomb.
The movie opens with Streep’s Ricki performing at Salt Well, the dive bar where she and her band The Flash are regulars. A phone call from her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) offers her a chance at redemption – for many years ago, Ricki walked out on him and their three young children to pursue her ambition of becoming a rock-and-roll star.
Things didn’t quite work out. Although she plays regular gigs with her band, she works as a cashier to support herself. Now, Pete informs her that their daughter’s Julia’s (Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer) husband has walked out on her, leaving her devastated.
Ricky makes the decision to go and visit her rarely-seen family, reopening old wounds and examining her decisions in the process.
Ricki and the Flash comes to the screen with a remarkable pedigree – a sublime cast and an Oscar-winning director and screenwriter in Jonathan Demme and Diablo Cody.
Yet, it is a film whose whole does not add up to the sum of its parts. Demme, the man behind such diverse output as Aids-based chronicle Philadelphia, horror –thriller The Silence of the Lambs and family drama Rachel Getting Married, here brings little new to the comedy/drama mix with his direction. That said, he probably just sat back and let his talented cast do their thing.
Streep clearly enjoyed the role and doesn’t hit a wrong note
The film’s biggest disappointment is in the screenplay by Diablo Cody. Her previous output includes the bitter-sweet teen pregnancy tale Juno and the bitter-bitter Young Adult about an angry woman suffering from arrested development.
In both cases, Diablo created deep and multi-layered characters and rich storylines featuring intelligent dialogue and respectively quirky and biting humour.
Her script for Ricki is a little pat and predictable, the outcome signposted a mile off. Her characters are rather thinly-sketched and the deeper issues raised by the film – like, for example, Julie’s suicide attempt and most obviously the reappearance of the wife and mother who abandoned her family years ago – are treated rather frivolously.
What saves the film from ordinariness, however, are the top notch performances. Streep enriches the material and fleshes out the character well enough despite some inherent contradictions – the abandonment of her family and rather unorthodox choice of career are at odds with her conservative beliefs. She makes Ricki a likable character, despite her questionable behaviour for which she is completely unapologetic. She makes a strong case for women who want to pursue their dreams.
Streep clearly enjoyed the role and doesn’t hit a wrong note. It is almost redundant to report that Streep shares obvious chemistry with Gummer. There is something authentically raw about Gummer’s portrayal of Julie’s mixed feelings of inherent love and seething anger towards her mother. Streep and Kline have played opposite each other many times before and they effortlessly recreate that familiarity of a couple who were once very much in love and whose obvious connection sparks when they meet again a year later.
Audra McDonald co-stars as Pete’s new wife Maureen and shares a strong confrontational scene with Streep, while rock star Rick Springfield makes quite an impact as Ricki’s co-musician and love interest.