In a nod to my discussion of music as CPR for the soul today’s movie, Little Voice, is for anybody feeling like they might need some volts sent straight to the heart. Jane Horrocks, the leading lady, almost out performs the great singers she impersonates here with no small amount of whimsy and grace. That being said, this film is firmly bounded by the world in which it is set – the working class society of greater regional London.
Little Voice is about a thorough introvert and it’s with great delicacy that the director takes you into her world without threatening that world, or needing to alter it with awkward plot devices. LV (Little Voice, or Laura which is her real name) is quietly restrained by grief and modern society, locked in and away because the world seems a foreign place to her since her Father died and left her without anyone who understands that her existence is a state of translation. It isn’t that she’s simply trapped within herself but that the language of happiness isn’t the same for LV as it is for many people. She’s not really into boys when we first meet her, she doesn’t speak easily, and she only really seems to care for the memories she has of a past she never lived – the past that recalls her Father.
LV’s sole recreation is to seclude herself in her attic room and play, listen and sing the records her Father loved, like those of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Bassey. We’re all reminded of other mad women in attics at this point, I’m sure. It is there she finds the freedom to express love, passion and to occasionally embrace all the outward trappings that go along with getting along in this world. One fateful day her acerbic, chain-smoking Mother (the brilliant Brenda Blethyn) drags home a crass, scruffy nightclub promoter, Ray Say (Michael Caine). Ray casts one ear on the girl and falls in lust: You can see the dollar signs in his eyes, which only seems to add to her Mother’s air of learned helplessness. She has a daughter she doesn’t understand, and doesn’t pretend to, not even when it might be in her own interests though she goes along with Ray’s idea to try and wrench some genuine passion out of the relationship.
LV beats to the heart of a very different tune to the one playing in her Mother’s heart. It’s not down and dirty she wants but dreamy and wistful. She holds the memory of her Father firmly in mind, and it is from that almost sacred remembrance, that self-same gift that she draws her inspiration to sing as nobody else can. It’s very similar to the moment in Agnes of God where the young novice, Agnes, sings with an ethereal voice, almost seeming enchanted by the angel who speaks to her. Little Voice does justice to that same sort of involuted poignancy. If you’re looking for a simple wham, bam, thank you ma’am then you’re unlikely to find it with this film but what you will find is a diamond in the rough, much like LV herself. Who LV is is seen to be more important than how she is, and that’s a rare thing these days.
You’ll likely need a passing acquaintance with recent British films like Billy Elliott or The Full Monty to really be able to get into this film. At any rate, if you liked them then you’ll definitely appreciate this film. Its occasional sentimentalism somehow manages to remain grounded in the familiar British flavour of the working class battle against the odds. Little Voice is based on Jim Cartwright’s play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which premiered in 1992 at the National Theatre in London and also starred Jane Horrocks.
Little Voice isn’t your standard metamorphosis, coming-of-age story. If you’re looking for the full transformation from mousy imp to spread-her-wings stage siren then you won’t find it here. That’s all for the best though because it would likely ruin the complicated character of LV to attempt it. It isn’t about whether LV ever makes it as a popular success but whether she succeeds at becoming her own person, spiritually and psychologically. That much does happen though the director could’ve done to draw the focus on that part a little tighter.
What saves the movie from disaster, ultimately, is not LV but her love interest Billy, played by Ewan MacGregor (Yum!) – a pigeon fancier who spends his days installing telephones. He and LV are drawn together by their ability to identify in one another the same wandering soulfulness that helps each remain untouched by the gritty, harsh reality of life. Together they’re nothing short of magnificent. They dance a silent Tango that outshines their surroundings, until all you can see is their purity of heart and imagination.
If you watch this movie for no other reason then watch it for Jane Horrocks’ renditions of ‘Daddy’ and ‘I Want to Be Loved by You’, both of which will mesmerise you. Horrocks succeeds in embodying the struggle we all have to find ourselves in a world without all that many ties which bind, an often cold, inconsistent and lonely world for those that don’t fit the popular pretty person mold. LV surpasses any attempt to trivialise that. Even in her moments of unrelenting solitude into which we get only a glimpse LV’s voice is never in fact little, and there’s far more in that than there could be in any perfect happy ending.
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