Songcatcher

Denied a promotion at her university, the musicologist Lily Penleric goes off in anger to the school her sister barely keeps running in the Appalachian mountains. There she comes across the find of her life: old Scots and Irish ballads passed down through generations and left almost unchanged by the isolation of the hills. Lily starts recording them to secure her promotion, but the further she gets into the songs and into the lives of the people singing them, the less clear her intentions become. The film's real subject is not discovery but ownership: whose songs are these, the recorder's or the singers', and if they are to be sold in the city, who gets the money. Maggie Greenwald poses the question not as a lesson but as a discomfort Lily gradually notices. Janet McTeer carries the part on its hardness. The songs are heard as they are sung rather than in professional arrangements. It is one of Emmy Rossum's first film roles.