Sure, Meryl Streep sings and plays the gee-tar real good and once again acts up a subtle touching storm. Sure, this is another funny story about a dysfunctional family. And sure, the film has all the tension and delivers all the satisfactions of a standard American romantic comedy. But its real kick is its political undertaking.
The dysfunctional family quickly comes to represent the cultural wars on America’s present landscape. Director Jonathan Demme sets up a situation where we’re tempted to define the characters as either Red or Blue state, Right or Left, Republican or Democrat, but then denies us that schemata. The harmony that Ricki’s bar band brings her son’s snobby whole foods wedding is a rejection of the division in US politics. It’s a provocative riff on America’s political rift.
Ricki (Streep) and Greg (Rick Springfield) are old hippies still living their musical lives on the cheap and raunchy. She took the hippie’s “I need to be me” excuse to abandon her family and here staves off her lover’s devotion. But now she’s Republican. One of her first quips is a slam at Obama’s presidency. She’s one of those who “wants our country back.” She’s “for the troops.” She wears an Old Glory tattoo on her back. She’s working LA but her bar and band evoke the Okie from Muskokie.
But there’s a reason she starts the wedding set with a Bruce Springsteen song — the same reason Springsteen climaxed the Jon Stewart farewell. Springsteen is the working class hero, Born in the USA, but who crosses all political lines. He can criticize the government without imperilling his patriotic cred. And that’s what Ricki grows into. The hippie turned redneck turns back to proper liberal values when she returns to her troubled daughter, confronts the bereft girl’s ex, and openly embraces her gay son and his lover. Ricki represents an America that has grown out of its cultural split. The film’s ethic lies in the lyrics of Ricki’s songs, in regard to both the personal and the national dilemmas.
Her ex Peter (Kevin Kline) apparently flirted with Ricki’s hippiehood but couldn’t make the leap. He stayed behind to become a corporate success — the Republican type — but trails clouds of his liberal glory nonetheless. He married a black woman — one with class, culture and wealth — who gives his children the mothering Ricki abandoned. Now, after an awkward exchange with Ricki, she is instrumental in bringing Ricki back to her family for the son’s wedding.
Despite the very formulaic sentimental plot Demme continually surprises us with his characters’ behaviour. The son that didn’t want Ricki at his wedding welcomes her most warmly and takes the initiative to start the dance to her Springsteen. She gets his blessing. That prompts the younger members of the stiff crowd to rip up the floor themselves. When Peter dissolves from his medicinal weed we expect him to renew his old nuptial rites (as does Ricki). But he’s done with that. He’s not the old free hippie. He prefers his new life. So, too, his wife Maureen’s generosity, after her acrid exchange with Ricki. When Ricki claims Peter still loves her, Maureen says “I’ll let you have that.” She is secure enough to allow Ricki that face-saving delusion.
Demme has often worked in musicals, from Stop Making Sense through three docs with Neil Young. (There’s an even older Young lookalike in the Flash.) Here Demme exercises his love of lyric and rock to dramatize an America where the current split into Right and Left just doesn’t — needn’t — hold up. The country doesn’t have to be split as enraged as it is. To recover unity and harmony they have to remember they are one family, America, and reach out to each other. And dance.
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