WITH its extreme highs and lows, its mix of warmth and harshness, Glasgow is a country and western kind of town if ever there was one. Where else, then, to set a tale that could have come straight out of a Loretta Lynn song?
There is plenty to recommend Tom Harper’s drama, besides the setting. There is the way the key players, Jessie Buckley and Julie Walters, spark off each other. Best of all is the delight writer Nicole Taylor takes in tiptoeing up to cornball before upending our expectations. This is a small-budget film but like Rose it has a big, bold, heart and should not be taken for granted.
Buckley plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, just out of jail on a tag. Mum (Walters) has been taking care of Rose’s two young children, both of whom are understandably cool towards the mother who let them down so badly. Mum wants Rose to buckle down and get a cleaning job beside her, while Rose dreams of going to Nashville and being discovered as the star she reckons she was born to be.
Through casual cleaning work, Rose meets Susannah (Sophie Okonedo). With her perfect life, Susannah is middle class through and through. Unlike disapproving mum, she reckons Rose could and should do whatever she wants. Her experience of life is that opportunities are there for the taking. Rose’s mum, meanwhile, believes, and says, “What’s for ye will no’ go by ye.”
If ever there was a pass-phrase for entry into the Glaswegian mammies club it is that one. Walters, by virtue of her accent, would have got in anyway. Ditto Buckley, so English in the
award-winning Beast, so Glaswegian here, so Irish in reality.
Buckley and Taylor are to be commended for making Rose a monumental pain in the bahookie for the most part. Forever blaming others for her woes, getting herself in bother, she is exasperating. But, as her mum tells her, when she sets her mind on something she can do anything. In the end, mum and Susannah are not so different after all.
So the tale of Rose rattles along, director Harper (TV’s Peaky Blinders, War and Peace) saving it from rambling by always having a twist in store and a destination in mind. At several points the drama looks like it is about to dissolve into cliche, only to prove the viewer wrong.
Buckley is terrific, giving her character layers upon layers, and the music by Jack Arnold is toe-tappingly good, even if you are normally allergic to C&W. All in all, you’d be Patsy Cline crazy to miss this one.
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