Hannah Montana: the Movie

OK, I said to myself. I can do this.

I was outside the glass doors of the Leominster multiplex, looking inward. It was early Saturday afternoon and the sun was shining brightly and warm. I took a deep breath and went inside.

Step one had been buying the ticket at the outdoor window. Step two had been going in the theater. Step three was presenting to the young woman at the velvet rope who tore my ticket in half and nonchalantly told me, "theater number three on the left."

As if I needed directions at this point!

Was I dreading seeing this movie? Of course not. I was very much looking forward to seeing Hannah Montana: the Movie. I'd already heard good things about it.

What I was dreading was the circumstances. The movie had only been out only a day, and here I was, showing up for the the first weekend matinee. It was going to be packed. Ordinarily I would go right into the auditorium and find a seat, but this time I lingered in the lobby until showtime, having decided perhaps to slip in after the trailers started.

It's not that I wanted to be inconspicuous. Rather I knew that if I found an empty row, inevitably a large group would come in and sit around me, or next to me, right at the last minute. I wanted to avoid that.

Why? While lingering in the lobby, I eavesdropped at the girl at the velvet rope and she tore tickets. Everyone was all going into the same auditorium as I was. And all of them, all of them, were either preteen girls or adults chaperoning preteen girls.

All I wanted to do was see the movie. Of course I knew in advance it would be this way. Partly I was doing this as a test of mettle, as a dare to myself. I could have come to weekday matinee, with the theater empty. But what fun would that be?

With a few minutes to showtime, I found an isolated seat in the fourth row, smack in the last row of the front section. There were large groups on either end of the row. It seemed like the perfect place.

The row in front of me was open, and of course, right as the trailers kicked in, a huge group showed up to occupy it---nine girls about seven or eight years old, chaperoned by a mother in her forties. They filled up all the seats in front of me. Now I truly felt like I was at Hannah Montana movie.

But once the show started, I almost completely forgot about the audience, except in the moments when they erupted in laughter or sometimes singing along. The movie was just so damn good.

Yeah, you heard me. The movie was awesome. Like I've said, Disney is the ace studio of Hollywood moviemaking right now, and this was one of their finest offerings in a long time. For what it tried to do (and this is always how I judge movies), Hannah Montana: the Movie hit a grand-slam homerun.

Using the character of Hannah Montana from the television show, the story is a fairly standard "abasement of the princess" narrative, specifically the "city girl in the sticks" variation, as we just saw in New in Town a couple months back.

As you undoubtedly know, the idea is that Miley Cyrus plays Miley Stewart, who is also Hannah Montana, a fact unknown to everyone but her close family and friends. The television show has chronicled the fictional Miley's escapades as she tries to live the life of a normal teenager in Southern California while also pursuing a career as a famous popstar. The fictional Miley is managed by Miley Cyrus' real-life father, Billy Ray Cyrus. But you knew all this already, of course.

On a day in which Miley (Stewart) ruins her best friend's sweet sixteen party on the Santa Monica pier, her father decides that she has gotten too involved in her popstar persona, and is starting to act spoiled. So he preemptively hijacks his daughter for a two-week stay at her grandmother's farm in rural Tennessee. Miley father tells her that for now, her career as Hannah is over, and that maybe she can be Hannah again, if the stay in the farm goes well.

So here you have the primary tension that a script needs. The protagonist has everything at stake: either she gets to be a popstar, or she loses it all. While this is going on, a scheming tabloid reporter is out to get some secret dirt on Hannah, and has been tipped off to the town in Tennessee where Hannah has gone. Thus we have another element of tension: whether or not the tabloid reporter will discover Hannah's true identity as Miley Stewart (and thus ruin her "normal" life at high school). For Miley/Hannah, everything is at stake. There is also another subplot involving a scheming real estate developer who is trying to ruin the quaint town by building a shopping mall on a piece of land that everyone loves, but for which the taxes are amazingly high.

The land is the cause celebre of the grandmother. Will Miley/Hannah get over her brattiness and help her grandmother? Of course she will.

But the real action is in the love story. Miley meets a young cowboy who works at the farm, and without revealing her identity to him, begins to fall in love with him. Likewise the widowed father falls in love with a woman of his own age.

The story clicks so well because it ties both of the love stories back into the central issue of Miley's identity. Has "Hannah" really consumed her completely, or is she still genuine as Miley?

The classical rules of cinema demand that lovers cannot hide their identities from each other. They must be honest. Thus both of the love stories are poisoned by the secret that Miley is hiding from everyone around her. Eventually this will cause an impasse in both the teenage and adult love stories, one that can be resolved only by some admission of the truth.

But what form will this admission take? Through some nice twists, Hannah (Miley) gets committed to staging a concert to help her grandmother pay the taxes on the land she cherishes. Meanwhile the evil tabloid reporter has caught the scent of a big secret about to come out. Meanwhile both romances are on the rocks because of the deception impasse.

Miley's recklessness in trying to be both Hannah and herself nearly cause a meltdown of the entire operation. As it should in a cinematic story, the status quo cannot continue. Everything is at an impact, and everything is in jeopardy. Storywise, everything was perfectly suited for a beautiful climax.

Somewhat reluctantly, Miley, as Hannah, comes out to give her pop concert to save the cherished piece of town land. How is she going to fix everything? How can she still be pop star while salvaging the relationship with the cowboy? She has to make a choice, as every protagonist must, at the climax of a good story.

What followed in the next several minutes was a piece of cinema that really just blew me away. In the span of about five minutes on the screen, I witnessed a generational revolution, as I saw Miley Cyrus emerge as a full fledged human being out from the chrysalis of both her Hannah Montana and Miley Stewart personae.

The song was specifically called "The Climb", and as Cyrus sang it, some of the little girls in front of her were swaying their arms to it, and I heard Miley Cyrus as a real voice. Not only was she real, but for that moment, she was the voice of her entire generation, breaking out from the phony coccoon that has swaddled them during their entire existences, becoming real just at the moment that the hyperkinetic consumer-driven America was coming apart at the seems.

It was a beautiful moment. It felt like the triumph of the life force, the youthful energy of love that rebukes the fake and evil falsehoods that have come before it.

This is why I go to movies, I thought to myself.

The music, as a whole, really stunned me. A year ago, after watching the DVD of the Hannah Montana tour movie, I commented that I had enjoyed the songs but couldn't remember any of them afterward. That was the old Miley Cyrus. The new one has the beginnings of a lyric maturity that will sustain her as a pop singer for many years to come, a real singer with something real to say. The duet she performs with her father, "Butterfly Fly Away," which says everything not only about the theme of the movie, but about Cyrus herself, was exquisite. Count me a fan.

Both she and her dad can't act their way out of a paper bag, but ten and twenty years from now, Cyrus is going to be winning Grammies and CMA awards.

I certainly wasn't the only one who liked this movie. The girls in the audience sang and danced as they left the theater. As they say, a good time was had by all.

In the parking lot, I just sat in my car for several minutes. I had planning to see a second movie that day, but it was just too powerful a movie not to let it sink in for a while.