Boychoir

Stet, eleven years old and newly motherless in Texas, is placed by the father he does not know into the country's best boys' choir, at a boarding school. The boy's voice is extraordinary and he takes no discipline at all. Carvelle, the choirmaster, neither indulges him nor gives him up. The film is not interested in music. It is interested in how long a voice lasts: every one of these boys will hit adolescence within a few years and lose it, and everyone knows it. The urgency under the film comes from there. The form is classical: rehearsal rooms, concert scenes, school corridors and a familiar conflict between teacher and student. François Girard directed. He had made music-built work before with The Red Violin and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould; beside those this sits in a far more conventional mould. Dustin Hoffman plays the choirmaster, Kathy Bates the head of the school and Garrett Wareing plays Stet. The choral pieces are the film's strongest element. Who it is for: viewers who like music-school stories and choral repertoire. Who it is not for: anyone after originality. The screenplay never leaves the gifted-rebel template and its conflicts resolve exactly where you expect.