Music and Lyrics

Directed by Marc Lawrence

Forget “Best Week Ever”/“I Love the 80s”-style snark. I really love a good pop song. The Beatles and Motown are great, I guess, but what gets me going are “My Heart Will Go On,” “I Will Always Love You” (Whitney’s), “I Love You Always Forever,” hits from T’Pau (“Heart and Soul”), Nu Shooz, Stacey Q, the Minogue sisters. Shania Twain and Gloria Estefan ballads make me cry. Maybe this stuff is more commercial calculation than artful expression, but who cares? I salute Mutt Lang, David Foster and Linda Perry for the way they make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. How did Diane Warren feel when she wrote “Alone” for Heart? Falling in love with a pop song is about as logical and knowable as falling in love with another human being.

So I was all set to give it up for Music and Lyrics, about a wacky love affair that blossoms during the haphazard creation of a similarly spirited bad-but-great chanson. The actors playing the lovers in question have both built careers on their benign, je ne sais quoi irresistibility (notwithstanding a few off-camera hooker-busts and tween rehab stints). I’ve always relented to perma-sprite Drew Barrymore (even through cringey moments like Poison Ivy, Mad Love and Ever After), the way she lisps out of the side of her mouth, her Campbell’s Soup face so child-like yet erogenous. Hugh

Grant’s naughty-but-clutzy Eton man-boy occasionally offers up sweet, soulful surprises (like in About a Boy). Hugh as Alex, a washed-up Andrew Ridgley-ish pop has-been with a comeback chance to write a song for a New Agey Britney-alike? Drew as Sophie, the ditzy MFA-drop-out who waters his plants and reveals an accidental knack for catchy lyrics? An awkward duet, off-screen sex beneath a piano, Drew in momentary tears when her artistic integrity and newfound romance are threatened? I’d inevitably adore and replay Music and Lyrics as much as Lionel Richie’s “Stuck on You” or Madonna’s all-ballads CD.

The disappointment begins with Drew and Hugh’s mismatched lips; they may be writing a beautiful pop song together, but Hugh’s pencil-thin mouth is no match for Drew’s pouty pucker. What comes out of their mouths isn’t much better. There’s an odd cacophony when splicing Drew’s mildly-retarded Valley drawl with Hugh’s clipped chatter. Her Botticellian hair is too shiny, his spiky do is too matte.

True, they’re both still indomitably appealing and disarming, and I love how Alex fusses over Sophie dumping her coat and bags atop his grand piano—and how Sophie can’t seem to pour a cup of coffee without spilling. Still, sitcomish on the big screen, Kristen Johnson as Sophie’s older sister and Brad Garrett as Alex’s agent/manager are loud, wide-eyed bystanders to the May-August romance. (The 15-year age difference/generational divide is glossed over, as is Sophie’s utter lack of pop music fandom.)

Even if the leads are as comforting as a bowl of Sugar Smacks, this is a romantic songwriting comedy that calls attention to its own deficiencies. If we’re to believe that the best elements of pop music and love itself are the serendipitous, happenstance intangibles—rather than the calculated, logical stuff that guarantees a hit song—Music and Lyrics underscores just how tricky it is to capture that unknowable thing that makes a pop confection so effortlessly enjoyable, even addictive. Inspiration and chemistry do come out of thin air, but it can’t be wholly fabricated. Perhaps Mariah’s “We Belong Together” and You’ve Got Mail were just shrewder at hiding the strings.