"Music of the Heart"

Wes Craven genre-hops, stumbles and makes a sappy melodrama.

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Oct 29, 1999 | Have our darkest auteurs all gone wuss on us? First "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi does a romantic melodrama set in the wholesome milieu of baseball. Then David Lynch, of all people, releases a G-rated Disney flick about an old man and his lawnmower. And now, just to make it a perfect hat trick, Wes Craven, the horror director who has more career mutilation-and-murder notches on his belt than possibly any other mainstream filmmaker, has made a sentimental little movie about a spunky inner-city violin teacher. Starring Meryl Streep. For Miramax. With all these touchy-feely vibes going around, it's a wonder Martin Scorsese didn't decide to do "Bringing Out the Dead" as a musical comedy.

No one would dispute an artist's right to spread his creative wings, and in the case of Lynch, at least, a little genre-hopping can prove just the jolt a career needs. But if "The Straight Story" succeeds because it explores new subject matter while retaining its director's unmistakably odd style, Craven's "Music of the Heart" falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.

You'd think that even without carving up the cast, the director could have come up with something that still shimmered with his familiar quirky sense of humor and visual panache. The man who helped define the slasher genre with 1972's "The Last House on the Left," redefined it with "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and then re-redefined it in "Scream" hasn't affected our psyches for all these years by being a mere shlockmeister.

He's imaginative, moody and frequently weird in just the right places. But the guy must be having doubts. He's so anxious to clamp down any vestige of old blood-and-guts Craven that he winds up creating just another utterly bland lump of Hollywood crapola.

"Music of the Heart," based on the 1996 documentary "Small Wonders," tells the true story of Roberta Guaspari, an unassuming Navy wife whose placid world was shaken when her marriage fell apart. Forced to fend for herself and her two young sons for the first time, Guaspari became a violin teacher in an alternative elementary school in East Harlem, helping to launch what eventually became a widely respected youth music program. When, after a decade of teaching hundreds of students, she found that city officials were trying to cut off her funding, the resilient educator fought back -- and won.

Next Page: Gloria Estefan's acting debut: Is this VH1's "Save the Music"?

• View blog reactions