The very idea of an arthouse film about a person going off to a remote area to "catch" songs makes me giggle uncontrollably.  Since when does independent cinema have to steal ideas from Pokémon?  Is there really any difference between gathering old Gaelic tunes and stockpiling "pocket monsters"?  Beats me, but at least Songcatcher didn't give me any seizures.

The film, which is a must for any music lover that isn't into bands that spell stuff wrong (i.e., Limp Bizkit, Korn, Staind, Outkast, etc.), is set just after the turn of the 20th century and opens at an unnamed university.  Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer, The King is Alive) believes she's in line for a big promotion in the school's music department, but the position is instead given to a well-respected musical outsider.  To make matters worse for Lily, the university's board made the decision unanimously, despite the fact that she was having an affair with one of the higher powers.

Disenchanted with the school (and men in general), Lily heads off to her sister Elna's (Jane Adams, The Anniversary Party) home in a coal-mining town deep in the Appalachian Mountains.  When she gets there, Lily discovers (among other things) the area is filled with a bunch of barefoot, jug-blowin', foot-stompin', overall-wearin' hillbillies who croon traditional folk music learned from their Irish and Scottish ancestors.  Even though she has heard some of the songs before, the locals' versions are much more pure and contain numerous verses that Lily has never encountered.

This is when the collecting starts.  Lily tries to have an assistant lug an extremely heavy recording device though the hills to track down as many songs as she can.  And she's met with resistance, initially in the form of a shotgun-wielding grandmother named Viney (Pat Carroll), and then, after you say to yourself, "I hope Lily gets a love interest," Viney's grandson, Tom (a very chunky Aidan Quinn, Practical Magic), who thinks Lily is just trying to take advantage of them thar bumpkins.

If you're going for the music, you won't be disappointed, as the characters belt out bubble-sounding songs that contain some seriously dark material (and they're performed by the likes of Taj Mahal and Emmylou Harris).  But there isn't much going on other than the music.  Writer/director Maggie Greenwald tries to pack too much feminist dogma into the story, which makes the whole thing seem like a heavy-handed message film.  So what if Lily was passed over for a job in favor of a man who was more qualified but happened to be an outsider?  Maybe if she spent more time on her career and less time under her married superior, she would have received the promotion.  Or at least a little sympathy.

The feminist territory isn't much of a surprise, as Greenwald's previous (and only other) film was The Ballad of Little Jo, which basically was a Western version of Boys Don't Cry.  And it's too bad, because Songcatcher has the potential to be a big crowd-pleaser (it even won a Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast at this year's Sundance Film Festival).  McTeer does what she can with her poorly written (and, at times, unlikeable) role, but the true standout is young Emmy Rossum, who plays one of Elna's musically gifted students.

1:49 –

for sexual content and an intense scene of childbirth