Here everything leads up to (and wilts after) Horrocks' showstopper. The plot was just a clothesline for Astaire's big dance number or Mario Lanza's solo. Watching her belt out one great standard after another, I was reminded of old musicals that were handmade as showcases for big stars. That would be Jane Horrocks' vocal performance. Another is that the romance, and a manufactured crisis, distract from the true climax of the movie. One problem is that the Michael Caine character, sympathetic and funny in the opening and middle scenes, turns mean at the end for no good reason. But the movie doesn't quite deliver the way we think it will. Will he win her love? Will she agree to sing? "Little Voice," written and directed by Mark Herman (" Brassed Off"), seems to have all the pieces in place for another one of those whimsical, comic British slices of life. A telephone lineman ( Ewan McGregor) is in love with her and uses his cherry-picker to levitate himself to her bedroom window. There is also a struggle going on for Little Voice's heart. (His club books acts more along the lines of an elderly knife-thrower who aims blades at his wife to the strains of "Rawhide.") The plot involves Ray's struggle to lure Little Voice onto the stage (he tells her a touching parable about a little bluebird) and his struggle to discourage Mari's amorous intensity. They can't get her to sing, but afterward, while they're standing on the sidewalk, they hear her doing "Over the Rainbow," and Mr. Sara Bareilles had long favored Little Voice as a title she named her debut album that, back in 2007. ![]() Boo ( Jim Broadbent), owner of a local club, to audition Little Voice. But Laura's voice is not reflected in a big personality she's a shy recluse who speaks in such a small voice that it has supplied her nickname. Ray hears the singing and realizes at once that he's in the presence of an extraordinary talent. ![]() She brings him home from a pub and suggests, "Let's roll about." One night a duel develops, between Mari playing "It's Not Unusual" downstairs and Laura doing "That's Entertainment" upstairs. Her new squeeze is Ray Say ( Michael Caine), a onetime London club promoter now reduced to managing strippers in this northern backwater. She's a loud, blowzy tart who picks up lads at pubs and brings them home. The rest of the house is ruled by her mother, Mari ( Brenda Blethyn, the Oscar nominee from " Secrets and Lies"). She shares his taste for classic pop records, and plays them again and again, memorizing the great performances. She plays a young woman named Laura, who mopes in her bedroom above the record store that her late, beloved dad used to run. Horrocks first appeared in this story on the stage (it was written for her by Jim Cartwright), and now in the movie she repeats an astonishing performance, which is plopped down into an amusing but uneven story about colorful characters in a northern England seaside resort town.
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