When Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce was asked recently
why she felt the need to make a narrative film about Teena Brandon, whose
experience was well-covered in the documentary The Brandon Teena
Story, Peirce had a good response. She said she wanted to bring Brandon
to life, so that audiences could see him as more than just pictures and
transcripts in a police report. But why exactly did noted horror director
Wes Craven decide to branch into conventional drama by adapting an
Oscar-winning documentary, Small Wonders, into the big-budget
feature Music of the Heart? The subject of Small Wonders,
music teacher Roberta Guaspari, is fully alive in the original film--so
much so that even the great Meryl Streep's interpretation of her is soft
and lifeless by comparison.
What Craven offers, then, with the aid of a screenplay by A Walk on
the Moon scribe Pamela Gray, is little more than explanations and
motivations--a blueprint for everything about Guaspari that seemed unusual
or difficult in Small Wonders. The documentary introduces Guaspari
as the instructor for an innovative East Harlem music program that attempts
to teach selected students how to play the violin. The story of both films
is sparked by a cut in funding for the arts in public education, which
leads to a big benefit concert at Carnegie Hall, where violin greats from
Itzhak Perlman to Isaac Stern offer support for Roberta's kids.
I'm sure Craven wanted to adapt Small Wonders because he wanted
to bring the stirring story to a wider audience. That's noble enough, and
it is likely that people who haven't seen the earlier project will be
suitably delighted and moved by Music of the Heart, which is fine.
But it's unlikely they'll feel the connection to their own life experiences
that Small Wonders offers.
Small Wonders is mostly about how to get to Carnegie Hall--which
is, of course, practice, practice, practice. The documentary doesn't shy
away from showing what a hardcase Guaspari can be, screaming at her
students and threatening to drop them (or actually dropping them) from the
program, while at same time eliciting the sort of miraculous performances
that will spark memories for any eager student who ever had a committed
teacher.
Craven, Gray, and Streep give us the scary side of Roberta too, but they
soften it with plenty of smiles and lots of backstory. They show us
Guaspari's tough divorce, and the hardships of subsequent single
motherhood. More gallingly, they give Roberta an unnecessary foil--an
officious, condescending fellow music teacher whose blatantly dull methods
are supposed to accentuate how brilliant Guaspari is. Except that nothing
Guaspari does in the classroom is inherently exceptional. She's merely a
hard taskmaster who understands that in music, discipline leads to harmony,
which leads to a feeling of accomplishment for her students. It's as
simple, and as difficult, as that.
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