Songcatcher

Songcatcher (2000) is worth watching (and listening to) for the Appalachian music alone. As much as there is to admire about this film, there is much to question and criticize as well. It comes across as the rough draft of a film rather than as a finished product. It is heavily thesis ridden, and the only times when it really seems to come alive are when characters sing or play—Iris Dement sings a ballad in one memorable scene, Taj Mahal (in a minor role as a visiting African American guitarist) plays a duet with another character, and in another scene, following a nighttime dance, three mountain people sing about death in haunting, dirge-like performances.

There is too much that is obvious and forced about the film. Clearly it is about women struggling to prevail or at least survive in a male-centered world. Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) leaves her position as associate professor at a small college when she is denied promotion to full professor by a group of male faculty. A male expert in her field (folk musicology) is hired in her place. Her lover, a ridiculously timid and mouse-like music professor, even votes against her. She moves to the Appalachian mountains to teach in a school run by her younger sister. For much of the film McTeer’s performance is wooden, and she portrays Penleric in a shallow, one-dimensional way. Virtually everything she says and does is predictable, and it becomes clear from an early moment that her character is going to be a main focus. But there will be many other points of focus as well.

All the women in the hill country are oppressed by men in some way. While the women characters are individuals with many redeeming qualities, the men are mostly animalistic dolts. They get drunk and beat one another up and get their women pregnant and make jokes about the schoolmarmish doctor who is stealing their music, according to Tom Bledsoe, played by Aidan Quinn. One theme focuses on women struggling against male patriarchy. Another focuses on the invading agents of civilization and progress, which threaten to wipe out or exploit the hill culture. (Presumably, Penleric is one of these agents, thought the film makes little notice of this fact). Another theme celebrates the rich musical culture of the hill people. Another theme seeks to dispel stereotypes about mountain people. Another theme highlights the lesbian relationship that Penleric discovers between her sister and a partner teacher at the school. Still another focuses on the gradual development of Penleric’s character, as she relaxes and drops her preconceptions and her stiff demeanor and discovers the humanity and cultural wealth of the hill people. And finally there is her developing relationship with Tom Bledsoe. Some of these themes are not developed in much depth. The lesbian relationship of the two schoolteachers is not very pertinent—though like everything else it falls victim to male intolerance.

Director/screenwriter Maggie Greenwald has embedded so many themes and agendas in the film that none is fully developed. The result is a disjointed, scatter-shot effect, and the film never fully congeals. Only the music, and the developing relationship of Penleric and Bledsoe, holds one’s interest. So too does the character of Viney Butler, grandmother of Bledsoe and an old mountain matriarch, played by Pat Carroll. Her encyclopedic knowledge of mountain music initially draws Penleric to her, and Viney undertakes to loosen Penleric up. Viney is the most vital character in the film.

The film constantly reminds us that Appalachian culture is in danger of being wiped out by invading outsiders who want to buy up the land, excavate coal, and bring progress. But it never resolves this theme or even makes its own stand on the matter clear. Should the hill people be left alone, their culture and way of life unmarked by the civilized world? Or should progress and coal mines and educated ways be encouraged?

At the end of the film, Lily Penleric has lost most of her notes and recordings of the music she went to record in the mountains. They were destroyed when the school burned down—the result of arson committed after some of the men discover the lesbian relationship of the teachers. Rather than start over, she decides to leave the mountains and invites Bledsoe to go with her. Although he has been wailing throughout the film about the horrors of the outside world, and about how the mountain people just need to be left alone, he decides to go with her. They are apparently going to earn their living by selling recordings of mountain music—a specific kind of exploitation, though also a means of preserving it. So this woman who struggled throughout the film to make her way in a world of men in the end backs down from her chosen career and goes back to civilization with her man. This doesn’t make full sense.

All these themes make the film stiff and shallow and give it the sanitized quality of a Hallmark Hall of Fame television drama.

The film indulges in its own stereotyping as it celebrates the culture and people of the Appalachians and their preservation of Scotch-Irish ballads for hundred off years. Yet the sentimental, nostalgic stereotypes of the film are certainly preferable to the hillbilly stereotyping we find in No Time for Sergeants and Deliverance.

One example of carelessness: Penleric and two others are struggling to haul her recording device up a nearly perpendicular mountain side so that she can record mountain ballads. The climb is nearly impossible, and her device is destroyed as a result. When they reach their destination, they find someone else—a land agent—already there at a fully developed homestead. Is there another way to reach the place? Is there a road? Why did Penleric have to climb up such a steep mountain approach when easier ways were apparently available?

Having stated all these reservations, I found Songcatcher enjoyable and, in its subject matter, unusual and original. I recommend it.