Military Wives (2020) - Movie Review

A bunch of middle-aged people get together to form a hobby group that gains enough notoriety to be featured in a TV show and/or documentary, which in turn gets turned into a dramatised film. This is one of those situations where I find myself reflecting on just how many times I’ve covered stories like this on here and how, with barely any exceptions, they usually just fall into the realms of ‘meh’ for me. Best case scenario, I end up being pleasantly surprised, albeit still not all that jazzed about it, and worse case, it turns into another Poms where I end up questioning what the filmmakers even think of their own audience. And with this one… honestly, I didn’t end up feeling either of those.

Based on a real-life choir network of military wives, the film’s recurring mantra that organisations like this are needed to keep the women’s minds off what their husbands are doing and whether they’ll get that dreaded phone call ends up flipping back around to describe the film itself. Just keep yourselves occupied, doesn’t matter what with, so that you can keep mind off things; pretty much the tone of the story, as there really isn’t much going on in this near-two-hour effort.

Kristin Scott Thomas has already proven that she can tear the roof off with the right material, like with The Party, and after Sharon Horgan’s turn in Game Night, I don’t see any reason to doubt her abilities either. However, seeing them regularly bickering as the duelling heads of the choir is pretty lame stuff. There’s a smidge of subtext to be gotten out of their methods, from Thomas’ Kate who runs the choir meetups like official lessons, while Horgan’s Lisa just wants to them to engage regardless of talent (a weirdly punk attitude, all things considered), but that doesn’t really lead to anything. Well, anything that could separate this from the norms of this sub-genre.

As for the sounds of the choir itself, there’s at least some engagement to be gotten out of their own present enjoyment in basically being the older generation’s Pitch Perfect. The song choices are decent, or at least make sense for this crowd, and the smaller moments like them talking about including Dido’s Thank You into their repertoire, with Lisa bringing up Eminem’s remix of that on Stan… yeah, I’m fairly predictable about shit like this, but that was a nice touch.

But with that said, while the singing is fine, it’s rather embarrassing just how lifeless composer Lorne Balfe’s score is alongside it. The generic orchestral string version of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time is so bland, it sounds like the taste of drywall (a hell of a feat for what was originally one of the best love songs of all time), and the rest of his work painfully fades into the background, one right after the other. It’s enough to make me wish that they probably should have just dumped the non-diegetic soundtrack and have the cast do all the legwork, but that would make this more interesting and potentially unique against its contemporaries, and there’s clearly no room for that here.

Another example of being perfectly adequate and something I’m likely to completely forget about before the week’s out, Military Wives is admittedly a non-painful sit but the sheer arse-numbing nature of the humour, the listless story and the tired plot beats more than make up for that. I can see older audiences getting into this for a mild diversion, and more power to them if they actually end up liking this, but as for me, it’s just… a film that exists. I don’t even have that strong an opinion on it, honestly.