Songcatcher
I watched this lovely film this evening and was quite enchanted by it. It tells the story of a woman associate professor of music who goes to visit her sister who is a teacher in a small school in the very rural mountains in Appalachia. While there she discovers that the songs that the local people are singing to entertain themselves are actually very close to the original ballads sung in Ireland, Scotland and England something like 200 years ago. She sets out to record the songs on paper and phonograph discs and use this to write a book about what she has found. Along the way, she finds love, danger and a new found appreciation of the mountain people that many of her colleagues in the large cities think of a savage, uneducated people. Aidan Quinn, the always wonderful Pat Carroll, and a very young Emmy Rossum in her first film role play some of the mountain folk that the lead character encounters in the hills. The lead is played by Janet McTeer, who is an actress I've heard of before, but had not seen in anything that I'm aware of. She has a commanding presence and is a very good actress. She takes this role, which could be played as very condescending, and makes a warm, loving person out of her. It's not a film with a lot of action or drama, though there is some of that in it, but a film of character studies of the folks in the hills and the contrast of their simple life with the lives of the more "sophisticated" folks in the cities.