Giving every impression of not knowing what day it is, or what year, Dustin Hoffman sleepwalks his way through this passionless, pompous film about an elite boys’ choir school: jammed with cliches, underwritten minor roles and unearned, unconvincing emotional climaxes. Hoffman plays the musical director: supposedly maverick and charismatic, of course, as opposed to the snippy little uptight assistant played by Eddie Izzard, required to suppress his natural wit and fizz for this dull role. Inevitably, they get a rebel kid whose untrained talent only Dustin sees: this is Stet (newcomer Garrett Wareing) who comes from a broken home, but conveniently happens to have a rich lawyer dad (Josh Lucas) who got his mom pregnant ages ago while married to someone else, and agrees to pay the school fees out of guilt.
In this way the film has the cake of Stet’s streetwise underdog status while gobbling up all that picturesque choir-school privilege. Naturally, all the bullies and snobs gang up on Stet. Of course, he’s a way better singer than any of them, and of course he has a self-pitying crisis and gets a huge reality-TV-type talking to from Dustin who demands to know if he really passionately wants this. This movie has been (with some justification) compared harshly with Whiplash. It also looked to me like a very boring version of Ian Curteis’s BBC TV mini-series The Choir from 1995, based on the Joanna Trollope novel. Very off-key.
