There’s a moment in Flora and Son where young single Irish mother Flora (Eve Hewson) asks her troubled son Max (Orén Kinlan) what movie he thinks he’s in. She means it as a jab intended to wake him up from his naive ego, but the line unintentionally lays bare the film’s main weakness: it often feels like Flora and Max are in completely separate movies.
Director John Carney has made a career out of musical romances, mostly set in his native Ireland. 2007’s Once is his masterful calling card, and he hasn’t made a film of that caliber since. That’s not to say that movies like Sing Street and Begin Again don’t have nice qualities to them. What I enjoy about Carney’s films is that they can be darkly comedic in a very intimate and immediate way without being cynical, and Flora and Son is no exception. The issue here is that the film’s romantic side outshines just about every other part of it.
On her way home from a nannying gig, Flora finds a beat-up acoustic guitar in a dumpster. She gets it repaired and brings it home for musically-inclined Max, but he rejects it in favor of his preferred DJ-ing and electronic music. This is where mother and son diverge in the story, as Flora learns to play the guitar with help from ruggedly handsome online instructor Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). I’m not saying Flora can’t have her own aspirations, goals, and desires while still being a good mother; that’s what the whole movie is basically about. I’m just surprised at how long the film loses track of Max’s inner life, and how surface-level that exploration is when it finally arrives.
The half of the film, which is exclusively Flora’s, however, shines brilliantly. Hewson and Gordon-Levitt have diamond-cut chemistry, and Carney uses some slick techniques of magical realism to get the two of them in frame together despite the fact that the characters only communicate through a webcam. It’s the gentle, funny, sweet kind of romance that very few filmmakers seem to have the skill to pull off these days, and both actors show their characters to be as three-dimensional as possible within this breezy framework.
All of that golden material is somewhat tarnished by a script which implies a pile of clichés. Even one of the songs Flora listens to at Jeff’s request in order to expand her musical horizons has been played to death in movie after movie after movie, and especially in cinema hailing from the UK or UK-adjacent parts of the world. You’ll know it when you see and hear it, and perhaps you’ll be less cynical about it than I am. Nevertheless, it isn’t the only haphazardly cloying thing about the film, but it sure is the loudest.
To be fair, though, the film’s enjoyable dark comedy is sprinkled throughout its runtime. There are points of glaring predictability that quickly win our favor with a witty comeback or strong visual punchline. I think Carney might have overestimated his ability to balance the darkness and the lightness of this story, but what works about his direction — and especially the work of his two lead actors — really works. | George Napper
Flora and Son is now in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+
