Music Is Everywhere
There’s this movie I’ve heard of once but quickly forgotten until I read about it again from The Fencesitter. It just came back to me while watching the opening credits that I knew there’s a movie that stars Freddie Highmore, Keri Russel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Robin Williams.
August Rush is about an orphan who’s looking for his birth parents. He claims to be hearing them through the wind; through music. He leaves the adoption home he’s been staying on for the last 11 years and set on a journey to find the very people who gave him the music . Unknown to him, both his parents don’t know he is alive. Upon his arrival to New York, the city where he was created on the one night that should’ve lasted forever, it soon became apparent that Evan/August is a child prodigy. Untrained and unexperienced, writing and playing music came to him naturally. Which wouldn’t be such a mystery if the people who discovered him knew that his mother was a cellist who came from a line of classical musicians and his father was a rock musician. Nobody believes him when he say he’s following the music to find them. Why would they? They don’t have his gift.
Maybe not everyone will like this movie. It requires forgetting a certain level of maturity. It requires believing in a fantasy. Schmaltzy as the plot is, every music lover will find something to relate to. Even cry about. I loved it because I’m naturally sentimental – I believe in love at first sight and that people can feel they belong together even if they don’t really know each other; even if they don’t end up together just yet, they will find each other in the end. I believe in that kind of magic just as I believe I will someday write music. Fantastic as it may sound, watching this movie reminded me of those things. You know when they say something “has a heart”? Well, this film took mine as well.
Evan/August loves music more than he loves food. The movie clearly shows just how much it does, too. Watch it for the uber talented cast. Watch it for the music.