It's not the first time Carney has "gone Hollywood," whether he thought, in his heart of hearts, that it was a good idea or not.
The director of Once took six years to follow up that singular hit, and when he did so, it was with the movie Begin Again, set in New York and starring -- well, not Americans in all roles, I guess, because the headliner is probably Brit Keira Knightley. But Knightley shares the screen with two very American people, Mark Ruffalo and Adam Levine, with Catherine Keener and Hailee Steinfeld in supporting roles. (And James Corden, as regrettable as that may seem now -- so I guess Carney was trying to represent the British Isles as much as he could.) I'd have reason to complain about that movie just as much as Power Ballad, but I did like Begin Again -- more than most people, anyway.
So maybe it was just the specific construction of Power Ballad, which I saw on Tuesday night, that bothered me. More than I would have been bothered if the whole thing was just set in the U.S., as Begin Again was.
Carney is trying to stick to his Irish roots, which he also did in the other two films that I haven't mentioned yet, Sing Street and Flora and Son. He's set most of the action in this movie in Dublin. But the plot revolves around one ex-pat and a graduate of a boy band, played by Paul Rudd and real-life boy band graduate Nick Jonas. I can imagine the conversation where he tried to get a mick into one of the roles, but whoever was controlling the purse strings said no. (A friend of mine reasoned that it would have been a great role for Colin Farrell, though probably not up to Farrell's usual highbrow standards.)
It's weird seeing so many Irish actors clearly playing second fiddle to these two Americans. We're talking bandmates in the wedding band, Rudd's wife and daughter, even some neighbors sprinkled in for good measure. None of whom feels the least bit essential to the plot, even when there are specific plot points that revolve around them.
Interestingly, the most famous Irish actor in the cast, Jack Raynor, actually plays an American. He's Jonas' asshole manager, never for a moment trying to fool us that he might be a redeemable character. (Unlike Jonas' character, who is written to have a redemption arc and then just winds up as a weaselly little shit -- one of a number of problems with this movie, which I did otherwise like enough to give three out of five stars.)
We are at such a vulnerable time for film, with great risks like Digger failing, and studios conglomerating in a way that can't mean good things for the finished product. So it's all the more disappointing to be confronted with these specific examples of the business rearing its head so prominently.
Power Ballad could not be made with Irish actors. It had to have two baby-faced Americans, both with a history of selling real tickets, in order to receive its green light.
And this is no shade on Carney, though I might have some shade on the specific choices he made. Of the only five movies he's been able to direct in the 19 years since Once, three have been steadfastly Irish, even if the last one did have some star power of sorts in the form of Bono's daughter, Eve Hewson, who has proven her rizz by getting cast in Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. If Carney could make another Once, he would do it in a heartbeat.
But Once was a singular film. You could only make it once.
So instead we get Power Ballad, incidentally Irish, and probably better if it just been zero percent Irish rather than a weak 30.
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