Duets

I suppose if your name is Bruce Paltrow and your daughter is a movie star named Gwyneth and she not only agrees to star in your movie but convinces a few of her movie star buddies to join her as well then you can get a movie like “Duets” made. There is no other possible explanation. Set in the world of karaoke, the movie is a variation on the portmanteau film. There are three separate stories told about six different characters (that is to say, three pairs of characters, which refers, I suppose, to the “duets” of the title, although apparently in the exciting world of karaoke, duet singing does occur). The six leads all meet at the end, though, at a big karaoke contest in Omaha. Excuse me, but isn’t karaoke so ten years ago? Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on it, since it is, I suppose, an art form of sorts. After all, people do actually sing up there on stage (at least “Duets” isn't a movie about lip-synching). And it is probably true that the opportunity to perform--at whatever level--becomes important to some people.

In fact, in the movie, several characters say “Karaoke is my life” (had even one more person in the film said it, I would have walked out), which is not only a rather telling comment about the dissatisfactions they are apparently suffering, but also about the depths to which the filmmakers have sunk to keep us watching. Another thing you may not know about karaoke is that there apparently exists such a thing as a karaoke hustler, a guy with a professional caliber voice who goes around betting local champions that he can beat the local guy in competition. Ricky Dean is just such a hustler. Dean, played by actual singer Huey Lewis, is a lost soul who wanders around from one karaoke bar to another. He finally meets up with his long-lost daughter, Liv (Paltrow) and-- voilá --we have a duet. Liv, some sort of Vegas B-girl, looks like a heroin addict and seems to have the IQ of a waffle. (Gwyneth should really speak to her Dad about the kinds of roles he is recommending to her.) The second duet is formed by Suzi (Bello, a normally interesting actress last seen in “Coyote Ugly”) a lost soul who wanders around from one karaoke bar to another, and pays her way with sex.

She meets up with Billy (Speedwell), a lost soul (don’t blame me if this is this getting repetitive) who was going to be a priest but now drives a cab. The last duet is comprised of Todd (Giamatti), a burned-out businessman who is also a lost soul, and Reggie (Braugher), an ex-con and robber who is less a lost soul than a doomed one. These three pairs of people spend a lot of time interacting and emoting, and they all wind up in Omaha for the big (and I suppose in the world of karaoke, a 5000 dollar prize qualifies as big, which seems, again, to lower the sense of drama in the picture) contest, as well as the movie’s big denouement. In the end, they meet mostly tangentially, and they all seem to experience an epiphany of one sort or another (gee, maybe I need to visit Omaha), apparently because, well, because the movie was ending. If this seems harsh, good, because the picture is ill conceived and executed with a bare minimum of competence. I will credit writer Byrum with some good lines and a few involving situations, but for the most part this is a movie about a bunch of uninteresting losers doing uninteresting things.

It may be possible to create a compelling drama that takes place in the world of karaoke, but this is not it. It also would have been nice to see some evidence that karaoke can be an innocent and exhilarating form of entertainment for otherwise normal people, but in the world of “Duets,” it is a strictly a haven for the confused and the deranged, for misfits and the unhappy. It made me want to stay as far away from karaoke, karaoke bars, karaoke contests, and the people who frequent them as possible. The most interesting thing about the picture may be the singing. Paltrow, Giamatti, and Braugher (if what we hear are, in fact, their real voices) are all surprisingly effective as singers, Bello less so. (And by the way, what karaoke singer in her right mind would choose to perform a dance number like the Eurhythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” in competition?) Lewis, of course, fronted his own band in real life, so it is expected that he can sing (his acting, however, is only fair). Dramatically, however, “Duets” wastes these good actors, most of whom barely escape with their dignity intact. The one exception to this is Braugher, an actor of such authenticity that he seems incapable of a making a wrong move onscreen. He rises so far above the mediocre material that he makes everyone else look like a summer stock refugee. Perhaps it is unfair to compare Braugher’s acting to that of the others, just like it is unfair to compare Lewis’s singing to that of the others. After all, in a world of pros, amateurs really can’t compete. (9/17/2000)