Reviews

I took accordion lessons from about the age of ten until I was sixteen and remember trying to defend it in a high school music theory class (I had no luck). I gave it up in favor of the saxophone (only slightly less disreputable) and then the violin and seldom gave a thought to the accordion,unless to wish I'd had the sense when I was a child to ask for piano lessons instead of the accordion .

All this is to say that I was only mildly curious when I saw this title on Link TV, "The Accordion Tribe," and I decided to watch it for a few minutes. But I couldn't stop watching--and listening. Not only is the music superb, but also the film conveys what it must feel like to be a musician--a superior musician--and what joy can come from playing in an ensemble of superior musicians.

Although the members of the "tribe" have in common a love of the accordion and a dazzling skill in playing it, they bring different orientations and sensibilities to the music. We come to understand how such contrasting styles can become a source of power as we see the musicians listening to each other while playing, echoing and amplifying and commenting in musical terms, with a smile or nod of the head communicating their pleasure, acknowledging each other's understanding.

More than once I was moved to tears, but, as others have suggested, the beautiful duet performed by the Finnish accordionist Maria Kalaniemi and a singer was a special occasion. I've never heard anything like it. But this was followed by another duet just as moving, with Maria Kalaniemi and the blind Austrian, Otto Lechner. Lechner, whose orientation is jazz, was remarkable throughout and highly articulate, witty in speech as well as in his music, but in this duet he soared.

The interweaving of the performers' talk with their music and travel is seamless. You feel you know each of them well by the end and hate to say goodbye. In a theater I would jump to my feet and shout, "Bravo, Bravissimo!"

It's at least watchable. Sean Penn holds one's interest with his muscles, swagger, and sweet grin, and Christopher Walken is good, though his charisma isn't as convincing as his malevolence. But, finally, the hole-ridden plot asks too much even of a skillful actor such as Penn. The movie announces itself as based on a true incident,but a plot must make sense on its own terms.

The father's gang, one of whom is played by the magnificent David Strathairn (wasted here), look as though they've just stepped out of the movie Deliverance. Oh, these bad hillbillies! But the setting, after about an hour, is established as Pennsylvania. Having lived in rural Pennsylvania for several decades, I'm more than willing to grant that there are rough characters lurking there, but they just don't look like these guys. Nor sound like them. Apparently there was no dialect coach, and, left to themselves, the actors replicated the inflections of mobsters in the Mafia movies so popular in the 80s.

The landscape, meant to be somewhere in Pennsylvania, is striking, but similarly out of kilter. An Amish buggy suddenly appears at one point, which suggests southeastern or central Pennsylvania, but the bluffs along the river are too white, the mountains in the distance a little too pointy, not the long ridges that stride northeasterly across Pennsylvania. If you can stand more of the monotonous music and can wait through the credits, you see that the film was in fact made in Tennessee--I guess for the same reason that a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes appears on a kitchen table at one point, occupying the center of the screen: a deal was cut by the producers.

The women in the movie, other than the girlfriend, played by Mary Stuart Masterson, are little more than ghosts. They seldom speak or do anything other than sweep the floor. Well, there's one stripper.

The movie isn't all bad. Walken, a pro, makes you believe in pure malice, and it's interesting to see the young Sean Penn learning (rather painfully) his craft.