This film is like a children's fable that forgot it's supposed to have a moral.
The movie begins with Melody Wilder (Saffron Burrows) having the worst day of her life. Her doctor tells her she has cancer and will be dead in two months, then she loses her job and finally, her boyfriend breaks up with her. So Melody abandons her crappy basement apartment, takes all her money out of the bank and decides to live like there's no tomorrow. For Melody, that weirdly involves living like a hermit in an expensive penthouse loft and buying a lot of stuff over the phone. Two delivery people fall in love with Melody. One's a man and one's a woman but neither of them have any reason to quickly fall into bed with Melody. Capping it all off, Melody buys and learns to play a guitar like the one she was fascinated with as a child, which we see in repeated flashbacks to her unhappy childhood living with her bickering hippie parents over a music store. As for the rest of the plot, I don't want to give it away but have you ever heard the story about the guy who was told he had 6 months to live, so he spent all his money and ran up huge bills on his credit cards because he's never have to pay them back? If you remember the twist to that story, you know what happens in The Guitar.
Writer Amos Poe seems to have come up with a script that is completely oblivious to its own meaning. The story of Melody is about freeing yourself from the chains that are holding you down, an ignorant desire for fulfillment, the perils of self-indulgence and the tempting appeal of the strange and unknown. This screenplay doesn't even acknowledge of that. It doesn't demonstrate or explore why Melody is a timid, tiny person before her diagnosis. It can't recognize how pathetic it is for someone to spend their last days on Earth catalog shopping. It fails to understand why someone might be truly attracted to someone in Melody's circumstance and how and why that attraction would wither away. It's even unable to fathom the lesson that either Melody or the audience is supposed to get from this film. The Guitar is like the work of a color-blind painter who makes the sky yellow and the sea black and the ground pink without knowing that he's doing it.
Director Amy Redford gives us a textbook example of the congenital flaw in the modern filmmaker. Individual images in The Guitar look nice, yet none of them flow together or add up to anything. Redford might be able to make good commercials or, given the large number of montages in this movie, great music videos. She doesn't give any indication she has the slightest idea how to tell a story visually, however.
Saffron Burrows spends a great deal of the film in her birthday suit, though we quite strategically never get a good look at her breasts. Whether she's clothed or not, Burrows manages to summon up a grand total of two expressions for her entire performance. She either looks anguished or befuddled. She never even blends the two. It's like someone switches her from one setting to the other. None of the other actors have a chance to show they can do anything more than exactly what the director tells them to do. We do get to see one of Paz de la Huerta's boobs and are thankfully spared the sight of any man ass.
It wouldn't be completely accurate to say The Guitar is a bad movie. It is aggravating and perplexing because you keep expecting the film to have a point and it never does, despite everything about the story indicating that it should. Unless you enjoy being exasperated, don't pick up The Guitar.
The movie begins with Melody Wilder (Saffron Burrows) having the worst day of her life. Her doctor tells her she has cancer and will be dead in two months, then she loses her job and finally, her boyfriend breaks up with her. So Melody abandons her crappy basement apartment, takes all her money out of the bank and decides to live like there's no tomorrow. For Melody, that weirdly involves living like a hermit in an expensive penthouse loft and buying a lot of stuff over the phone. Two delivery people fall in love with Melody. One's a man and one's a woman but neither of them have any reason to quickly fall into bed with Melody. Capping it all off, Melody buys and learns to play a guitar like the one she was fascinated with as a child, which we see in repeated flashbacks to her unhappy childhood living with her bickering hippie parents over a music store. As for the rest of the plot, I don't want to give it away but have you ever heard the story about the guy who was told he had 6 months to live, so he spent all his money and ran up huge bills on his credit cards because he's never have to pay them back? If you remember the twist to that story, you know what happens in The Guitar.
Writer Amos Poe seems to have come up with a script that is completely oblivious to its own meaning. The story of Melody is about freeing yourself from the chains that are holding you down, an ignorant desire for fulfillment, the perils of self-indulgence and the tempting appeal of the strange and unknown. This screenplay doesn't even acknowledge of that. It doesn't demonstrate or explore why Melody is a timid, tiny person before her diagnosis. It can't recognize how pathetic it is for someone to spend their last days on Earth catalog shopping. It fails to understand why someone might be truly attracted to someone in Melody's circumstance and how and why that attraction would wither away. It's even unable to fathom the lesson that either Melody or the audience is supposed to get from this film. The Guitar is like the work of a color-blind painter who makes the sky yellow and the sea black and the ground pink without knowing that he's doing it.
Director Amy Redford gives us a textbook example of the congenital flaw in the modern filmmaker. Individual images in The Guitar look nice, yet none of them flow together or add up to anything. Redford might be able to make good commercials or, given the large number of montages in this movie, great music videos. She doesn't give any indication she has the slightest idea how to tell a story visually, however.
Saffron Burrows spends a great deal of the film in her birthday suit, though we quite strategically never get a good look at her breasts. Whether she's clothed or not, Burrows manages to summon up a grand total of two expressions for her entire performance. She either looks anguished or befuddled. She never even blends the two. It's like someone switches her from one setting to the other. None of the other actors have a chance to show they can do anything more than exactly what the director tells them to do. We do get to see one of Paz de la Huerta's boobs and are thankfully spared the sight of any man ass.
It wouldn't be completely accurate to say The Guitar is a bad movie. It is aggravating and perplexing because you keep expecting the film to have a point and it never does, despite everything about the story indicating that it should. Unless you enjoy being exasperated, don't pick up The Guitar.