Film Review: The Guitar (2008)

Last night the husband and I watched a film. We watched it from our brand new gorgeous brown leather couch we bought a few weeks back at Crate 'n Barrel. We don't go to the movies very often and we don't even have a new TV; it's not big or flat screen. All it's got is color. But we do have a top notch cable package and we've got a DVR, so recording films off the Sundance network is a principal form of entertainment.
The film we watched was called "The Guitar," directed by Amy Redford and starring Saffron Burrows. I feel some need to check and see if Amy if related to Robert, and Saffron to William, but so far, I haven't. The story is of a youngish woman who has been told by her doctor (played deadpan straight by Janeane Garofolo) she has a virulent form of cancer; that she has less than two months. In response to this dire diagnoses, topped off by the news she's been laid off at work, plus her sort of boyfriend tells her he needs "a break," the character, called Melody, goes feral. By this I mean, she returns to her native state, which is to be a child who goes for instant gratification. These gratifications include walking out of her crummy basement apartment (leaving, she doesn't even bother to close the door), take a short term lease on an incredible loft condo, order scads of marvelous furniture, amazing clothes, every delicious take out meal imaginable.
After an orgy of spending, because why worry about credit card debt if you're dying, Melody embarks on another kind of gratification, which is to say, sexual. The black delivery man, named Roscoe because his parents met in the upstate New York town at the Roscoe diner, brings her flowers one day instead of the usual blitz of packages, and she tumbles into bed with him; likewise the pizza delivery chick, a sexy, dopey-voiced Italian girl engaged to a guy who's "connected." At one point the delivery guy comes over when she's already with the chick and they all wind up pulling on costumes and gamboling about the loft for a few hours playing orgy. This is all portrayed in a tame way. The delivery man never removes his wife-beater and there's not even a glimpse of tit. Melody is so tall and skinny anyway her nudity barely registers.
That length of leg and torso and her long hair and wide cheekbones and jutting hips make her a fantastic clothes horse, though, and part of the pleasure of the film for me were her clothes, which inspired envy. I loved her choices which were a melange of what you might find in the Anthropologie catalogue and Gorsuch. Many of her clothes are boutique bohemian featuring lots of embroidery, tassels and wild spurts of color, everything cashmere and raw silk and velvet.
"The Guitar" is loaded with flashbacks, which of course rather fittingly, reveal the back story. As a child, Melody longed for a guitar, specifically an electric guitar, which her always squabbling, slightly grubby, seemingly ne'er do well parents consistently denied her. As a child, she actually stole a guitar and almost got away with it. Now that she's only got two months to live and plenty of credit, she buys herself a Stratocaster and huge amps and a woofer and a tweeter and long cords and a simple black strap and 100 picks and a DVD tutorial how to play the thing. Just when she has everything she needs and is even starting to get good on the guitar (and of course she has natural talent), her world falls apart. She finds out her tumor is gone, she's cancer free, the delivery man's wife is pregnant, the pizza girl is getting married and she has to get out of the loft condo. Broke, saddled with debt, jobless, after a few days all she's got left is the glam clothes on her back, and the guitar. She takes it to the park and is almost immediately discovered by a hip, cool rock band who invite her to join them and the next thing you know, she's performing on stage, transformed into a regular Patti Smith, only gorgeous. Model gorgeous.
"The Guitar" is a terrible movie. It's ridiculous, although perhaps no more ridiculous than a television show I quite like so far called "The Big C," starring Laura Linney. In that show, Linney plays a repressed, stick in the mud, ultra self contained housewife who finds out she has terminal cancer and has about a year to live. Aside from Laura Linney's character throwing her loving if boob-like and messy husband out of the house and digging a giant swimming pool in her front yard, what "The Guitar," and "The Big C" are about indulging in all one's fantasies about how one
wants to live, what they want to eat, and who they choose to hang out with when time is running short, what the film and the show have in common is a compelling central character who is good at hiding out. Good at keeping secrets, i.e. telling no one they have cancer. And that's worth talking about.
For decades the "C" word was a bogey man, a word one spoke about. If you or someone you knew had cancer, you whispered. If you were sick you were supposed to keep it a secret for as long as you could, in order not to lose your job, frighten away your friends, bum out casual acquaintances and neighbors. You were expected to bravely fight your disease, but in silence, only sharing personal information in the sanctity and safety of a cancer support group. Then about a decade and a half ago, talking about cancer became an open thing. Sharing itself became a kind of healing. Cancer came out of the closet and everybody began talking about it.
Which brings me back to "The Guitar" and "The Big C." On "The Big C" Laura Linney's character, Cathy, keeps her cancer from her family members but privately screams, "I'm living the dream!" She only goes to a support group at her sexy young male doctor's urging, where her impulse once there is to get up and leave. She is so not into sharing. One of the things that annoys Cathy so much is when the leader tells her "Cancer is a gift." She's not at a place yet where she agrees. That, of course, will be her character's evolution on the show and will propel the story along as Cathy susses out just what her gift is. Melody, in "The Guitar," already knows about the gift. That's why she gives herself everything she can, which is in turn what cures her so she can go on to live her childhood dream to be a rock star. Or at least with legs and cheekbones like hers, plus a killer Strat, at least look the part.