One of the best music box sets I own is Rhino’s four-CD Girl Group Sounds: One Kiss Can Lead to Another. I already liked tracks by such groups before buying it, but I was largely aware only of Phil Spector’s productions. This set greatly expanded by musical education. It was like radio from a parallel Earth where The Beatles never happened and female artists ruled the airwaves.
1996’s Grace of My Heart stars Illeana Douglas as such an artist of that era, albeit a fictional one. She’s a songwriter and singer trying to escape from the few likely futures available to a young woman born to a Philly steel magnate.
She’ll win a recording contract in a singing competition but that is a dead end that leaves her struggling in New York. The engineer at a session informs her girl groups on the way out anyway, but he will pass her demo around. That tape gets the attention of John Turturro, one of the many minor label owners operating out of the Brill Building. He wants her to write a song for a Black male vocal group on his roster. But, even before he’ll have her do that, he encourages her to change her name and concoct a fake background.
We’re barely into the film and it has already made a few missteps. Nothing major, but things that already had me wondering if this is supposed to truly capture the sound and spirit of a time or if we are experiencing that as filtered through the three decades which had passed by the time this film was made.
You see, what I’m guessing is supposed to be a doo wop group sounds something like Boyz 2 Men. We’re not hearing what that music would have sounded like in the late 1950’s but what a tribute to it would have been in the 1990’s. A later scene has a psychedelic-tinged girl trio making a promo as they sit in a tree, visibly bored out of their minds. Is this supposed to be a real shoot in the late 1960’s, or the same scene as filtered through the ironic detachment of the 1990’s?
One thing I picked up on very quick is Douglas is supposed to be Carole King. After some initial success as a writer of pop tunes, she finds herself in a romantic and writing partnership with Eric Stoltz, playing the least believable beatnik since Bob Denver was on Dobie Gillis. He writes songs that address social issues, so I assume he is supposed to be Gerry Goffin, with whom the real-life King wrote “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, one of the most daring pop songs of its time. The surrogate track here concerns a 12-year-old girl who discovers she is pregnant.
The girl we see as the inspiration for that song is played by Tracy Vilar. She will be on the margins of the film through to the end credits, as the babysitter of both Douglas’s daughter and her own son. She’ll be there when Douglas has a brief dalliance with a DJ played by Bruce Davison. Despite him being married, it is a shame their flirtation is doomed, as he seems to be the best match for her. Vilar will go with Douglas to California when the songwriter marries Matt Dillon, who is obviously supposed to be a mirror-world version of Brian Wilson.
Dillon’s performance is the biggest misstep here, played broadly enough to border on cartoonish. Other performers fare better, such as an unfortunately underused Bridget Fonda who makes a brief appearance as a tortured singer who is clearly a stand-in for Leslie Gore. Much like that real-life counterpart, Fonda’s character is closeted.
Almost more than the performances, the success of the film depends upon the ability of newly penned tracks to sound sufficiently like the material of the various artists obviously referenced here, and of the particular time frames. These frequently come close, but only enough to generate that kind of uncanny valley effect that makes CGI so often ineffective. The number in the style of Leslie Gore comes closest to the mark, but the ones that are supposed to be Smile-era Brian Wilson miss wildly.
What is notable about a studio scene where we hear one of those songs is the performer at the theremin is the guy who did the same in real life on the sessions for “Good Vibrations”. On the commentary track for this blu-ray, Allison Anders shares an interesting anecdote about the guy not fully recalling the name of that legendary track, but instead enthusing greatly over his work on the theme tune for My Favorite Martian.
I also learned from the commentary track that the fellow (definitely not the) Beach Boys are played by members of the band Redd Kross and that Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis is the engineer at the session. Other cameos by musicians in the film include Chris Isaak, Jill Sobule, Shawn Colvin and Larry Klein.
A fatal flaw for me is the miming in the musical sequences. I can accept some variance between an actor’s speaking voice and even an obvious substitute singer, but Douglas is voiced by Kristen Vigard, who makes a living with those pipes and was the lead in the first performances of Annie. Hearing Douglas talk and then having Vigard’s singing emerge the same lips is like if Lucille Ball’s singing voice was dubbed in by Fiona Apple. The discrepancy is too great to ignore, and Douglas, though otherwise a very capable actress, often doesn’t hold herself or breathe in a manner which is convincing for a person vocalizing in this manner.
There’s roughly a half-hour of deleted scenes and outtakes on the disc. Together with comments in that commentary track, there was the potential for a better, though I suspect not necessarily great, film. The key problem with the inclusion of those scenes is it would have padded a film already too long to an unacceptable length. Still, we lose such details as the affair of Douglas and Davison remaining unconsummated, and fellow songwriter Patsy Kensit’s revelation she is a native New Yawkah and an orphan instead of a posh Brit.
In the end, I’m not sure what Grace of My Heart is supposed to be or who it is for. It isn’t a biopic, even a fictionalized one of Carole King, because it touches on people who weren’t part of her life (spoiler alert: King was never married to Brian Wilson). If it is supposed to only evoke the various scenes and cultures of a time gone by, it barely puts a toe into any one of those before wandering off to another. Not only did it fail to immerse me in that period, but its whiff of 90’s aloofness left me wondering if it had seriously considering taking that plunge.
Dir: Allison Anders
Starring Illeana Douglas, John Turturro
Watched on Scorpion Releasing blu-ray