Stinky is the only word to describe this earnest thriller in which a famous American opera singer learns life lessons (and gets jiggy) in a hostage crisis.
Julianne Moore is Roxane, the soprano with the golden throat; Ken Watanabe is Mr Hosokawa, the cultured Japanese businessman lucky enough to bed her. Moore and Watanabe are sublime, serious performers. You blush on their behalf.
Roxane is in South America singing for big whigs, including Hosokawa. When Roxane is caught up in the siege she says of her Marxist revolutionary captors that they’re “not human”. She’s about to discover the opposite is true.
The blunder made by director and co-writer Paul Weitz (About A Boy) is that Roxane has no texture. Both before and after her epiphany she’s a fantasy figure, and her interactions with the shy, studious and soulful socialists who come to crave her approval are not only patronising but dull. As for Hosokawa, he’s fawning and creepy.
Ann Patchett, on whose provocative novel the plot is based, must be gutted. It’s the nail in the coffin that the sequences where Roxane “sings” also fail to convince. It’s obvious that Moore is lip-synching to someone else’s vocals (in this case Renée Fleming’s).
Music is essential to the plot,. Weitz should have cast Fleming in the lead. In a phoney baloney mess, she, at least, would have rung true.
