IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
VERY ANNIE MARY
Written and directed by Sara Sugarman
NR, 105 minutes
Very Annie Mary is as cute and unformed as a puppy. It explodes with ecstatic energy, and just as suddenly drops into a deep sleep. It does everything but lick our face to get us to love it, and a lot of it is certainly lovable. But its artlessness sometimes causes it to trip over its own large paws. Writer-director Sara Sugarman's screenplay won the 1999 Sundance International Award, but its bursts of comic originality are counterbalanced by a predictable storyline and underdone specifics of character and truth.
Annie Mary Pugh (Rachel Griffiths) is a gawky adolescent of thirty or so who lives under the roof and thumb of her widowed father Jack (Jonathan Pryce), the baker in the little South Wales town of Ogw. Jack, an extroverted, lecherous sort, is known as "The Voice of the Valleys" for his fine Welsh tenor, which he exercises on operatic arias broadcast through speakers mounted on top of his bread truck as he makes his deliveries wearing a Luciano Pavarotti mask. Annie Mary too has a beautiful singing voice, or did once. At sixteen she won the Welsh national competition at Eisteddfod and was awarded a scholarship to study singing in Milan. But her mother died, and she hasn't sung a note or matured a lick since. She keeps house for her father, the tyrannical Jack, who treats her with cruel contempt. He berates her cooking, disparages her singing, forbids her to use the piano except to accompany him, and even summons her to his room at night to curl up at the foot of the bed to keep his feet warm.
Annie Mary's best friend is Bethan Bevan (Joanna Page), a terminally ill teenager for whom the town is trying to raise enough money to send her to Disnelyand before she dies. Bethan doesn't really care much about going to Disneyland; all she really wants before she gamely checks out is to hear Annie Mary sing again. Will she? Won't she? Whatever is killing poor Bethan, it certainly needn't be the suspense.
When a ramshackle house comes on the market, Annie Mary dreams of buying it and setting up life on her own. "I think I'd be good at sex," she muses, though her attempt to buy herself a kiss for her birthday from the supercilious young man she dotes on ends in humiliating rejection. Then a nasty twist of fate turns things upside down and ends her chances of getting away.
Sugarman has done a nice if sometimes self-conscious job of harnessing that traditional British cinematic franchise, the colorful small town filled with quirky eccentrics. There's the minister (Kenneth Griffith), who gleefully unpacks a shipment of scratch 'n sniff Bibles; Mrs. Ifans, a randy widow who trembles with lust as Jack pokes a finger into her jelly cake at a church social; and Hob and Nob (Titus's Matthew Rhys and Black Hawk Down's Ioan Gruffudd), a gay couple who run a coffee shop and do a fine rendition of "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun".
But too often the moments are played for the moment, without a sense of what went before. When Jack gives Annie Mary a birthday present, she unwraps it eagerly to find a cabbage. Is this typical? And if so, why is she so eager? When he asks what she did today and she tells him she played the piano, he scolds her harshly for wearing it out. Has this never happened before? If it has, why tell him this time? And what kind of person was Annie Mary before her mother died, when she won the singing competition? Was she always this same ungainly, mentally and socially challenged klutz? The movie too seldom asks how we got to where we are from where we were.
Rachel Griffiths is a wonderful actress, and it is thanks mainly to her that Very Annie Mary survives (she also turns in a superb performance in another current release, The Rookie.) She gamely tackles the challenge of pratfall humor, bumping into doorways, slipping spread-eagled down a flight of stairs, and doing avery funny turn in an over-inflated fat suit in a karaoke contest. But despite Griffith's buoyant talent, we're never quite sure just who this Annie Mary is. How complete is her collection of mental marbles? How good was her voice, where did it go, and how did this neglected muscle suddenly regain world class pitch (thanks to soprano Meriel Andrew on the soundtrack)? And how on earth does she navigate the sudden, unprepared metamorphosis from ugly duckling to swan?
Griffiths is smoothly abetted by the great Jonathan Pryce, who manages to flavor the monstrous character of the father with charm and magnetism.
When all's said and done, Very Annie Mary is an agreeable and occasionally hilarious movie. It might be even funnier if we could understand more of the thick Welsh dialect that saturates the spoken word. You'll find yourself identifying key words and reconstructing sentences from there. More often than not, it's akin to a dog's understanding of human speech - we don't get the words so much as the tone of voice, but often that's enough.
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