Music of the Heart

Roberta Guaspari is left by her husband and moves to East Harlem with her two sons. She has fifty violins. She starts teaching violin at a public school with no teaching experience and with nobody believing these children can play. Ten years later the programme is about to be cut for budget reasons, and to stop it she organises a concert at Carnegie Hall. The subject is not music but how a programme gets lost inside public education. As hard as it is for Roberta to teach, it is harder that ten years on the class is still considered dispensable. The form is unshowy: classroom, corridor, home. The emotional rise is at the end and gathers into a single scene. The production rests on a real person and a real concert; Guaspari's students appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1993 alongside violinists including Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Arnold Steinhardt, who appear in the film as themselves. Meryl Streep had to learn the violin in a short time and was nominated for the best actress Oscar. The strangest thing about it is the director: Wes Craven had spent his whole career in horror, and this is the only film he made outside the genre. Aidan Quinn and Angela Bassett are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like teacher stories and drama drawn from real events. Who it is not for: anyone hoping it will leave the template; the film applies the known beats in order.