Little Voice (1998)…

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~Thursday~ Bob and I were discussing gay icon divas tonight, and he was reminded of a movie called Little Voice (1998), which I had never seen.

Neither had I ever heard of Jane Horrocks, who stars in it, and since Bob owned a VHS copy of the movie, we watched it together.

The synopsis

A hopeless introvert, Little Voice (LV), can only manage to express herself by singing along to records in her room, in the timeless voices of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and others. Once her eccentric mother’s new boyfriend, a sleazy talent scout, overhears Little Voice’s incredible crooning, he’ll do anything to drag the recluse into the spotlight and make her a star.

The trailer

My thoughts and observations

  • I found this movie to be good, but not great.
  • I have a hard time with characters that take forever to say something, and this LV character drove me up the wall most of the time. I mentioned this same thing in my thoughts and observations on both Ida and I’ve Loved You So Long.
  • I found the amount of time the audience was willing to wait for LV to get to the stage (for her second performance), watching inane “acts” in the meanwhile, and then waiting for her to start singing, completely implausible.
  • It’s rather remarkable that she sang all of the songs herself. As Roger Ebert notes in his December 4, 1998 review, “[S]he is a singer. And not just a singer, but an impressionist who can perform in the voices of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday, among others. And not just an impressionist, but a mimic so skillful that the end credits make it a point to inform us that Horrocks sang all her own songs in the movie. We need to know that, because her mimicry is so exact that we assume it must be lip-synching.”
  • Themes touched on in this movie included:
    • Agoraphobia
    • Stage fright
    • Shy people with big voices (made me think of Michael Jackson)
    • Being “caged in”
    • Show business seediness
    • Facing your fears
  • I gave this movie one-and-a-half thumbs up.

Have you seen this movie? If so, what did you think of it?
 

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