BY ABIGAIL GRABER

In print | November 29, 2007

“I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales,” begins Evan, the 11 year-old orphaned narrator of “August Rush.” Audiences, be alert, for we have been given fair warning: abandon all cynicism, ye who enter here. Suspend disbelief, banish doubt, take incredulity to a dark alley and thump it on the head so that we may entertain increasingly improbable assumptions as we tag along with Evan on his journey to find his parents through the power of music.

We must assume that all musical people of every breed are metaphysically connected. (We must ignore the fact that our fathers venerate classical music and discern nothing but noise from that junk we kids listen to these days.)

We must assume that two adults of the 21st Century don’t know where babies come from.

We must assume that a hospital would accept papers from a mother signing her child away for adoption…while the mother was unconscious.

We must assume that Robin Williams has a reason for being in this film, although we cannot say for the life of us what that reason might be.

But even if an adult audience finds itself not only willing to suspend, but expel disbelief, take its lunch money and send it to reform school, this movie would still be bogglingly stupid.

“August Rush” is based loosely on “Oliver Twist,” though the filmmakers leave their source uncredited, thus worming their way out of a visit from the Ghost of Charles Dickens Kicking Their Butt. I’m sure Dickens is all too happy to let writers Nick Castle, James Hart and Paul Castro take credit for this one. (On a side note: three writers! For a story that’s been in the public domain since 1838! The humanity!) My only knowledge of this story may be based on the Disney version, starring cats, but I can categorically state that the cats were more convincing.

Alas, instead of cats, we get Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Keri Russell, with him doing that attractively brooding thing he does so well and with her doing that innocently waifish thing Winona Ryder does so well. He’s Louis, a troubled rocker looking for, well, something unspecified that requires a lot of brooding; she’s Lyla, a chaste classical cellist under the thumb of her controlling father. They meet on a rooftop one night in New York. Some stilted dialogue, a series of ponderous close-ups and one decorous fade-out later, we get Evan (Freddie Highmore, reduced to a high, breathy monotone by his American accent).

Newborn Evan is signed away for adoption by Lyla’s father while she lies semi-comatose from a car accident in what is apparently the least scrupulous hospital ever. He grows up unhappily in the Walden County Home for Boys, the kind of idyllic country orphanage that hasn’t existed since about 1838, and at age 11, he sets out to find his parents by following the music he hears all around him. Along the way he meets Wizard (an overacting Williams; think Fagin with inexplicable piercings), who takes Evan into his creepy band of child street musicians; befriends and then be-enemies Arthur (Leon Thomas III; think the Artful Dodger), whom Evan displaces as Wizard’s favorite; eludes the search of a kindly adoption official (Terrence Howard) and generates more sappiness than a coniferous forest.

Dickens himself couldn’t have produced more ham-handed material, and he was not one known for his subtlety. (I know! I shall call him the Dodger! And he shall be… dodgy!) All of the main characters seem to come from Mars, so caught up are they in their little dream worlds that mundane things like traffic and telephones seem incomprehensible. Director Kirsten Sheridan’s cinematographic choices are equally stultifying. Close-up of boy looking at girl. Close-up of girl looking at boy. Close-up of boy looking at girl looking at boy. Cut to film reviewer vomiting into her popcorn. Decorous fade-out. Eventually, I started to jazz things up a bit by mentally editing the endlessly repetitive shots of girl/boy/kid walking into the distance by adding a bus sideswiping them just as they turned to look soulfully back at the camera. I sorely missed the cats.

Heavy-handed Dickens may have been, but at least his novels were pointed and relevant. It’s a shame that “August Rush” missed the real modern Dickens’ story in its search for a cozy, untroubled fantasy. How about making an “Oliver Twist” update about a black (or Latino, or really anything except white, healthy and cute) musical prodigy caught up in the nightmarish foster-care system of New York? In “August Rush,” the worst thing about the orphanage is that the older boys tease Evan. Big deal. Oliver is alive and well on the streets of New York today, and he doesn’t look like the rosy-cheeked Highmore, and no kindly adoption official like Howard is looking for him. Dickens would have had something to say about that; it’s clear that Castle, Hart, Castro and Sheridan have got nothing.

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