A competition

I did a review of the Elizabeth Taylor movie Rhapsody not too long ago. I was thinking of that movie when I recently watched The Competition, as both have decided classical music themes and a stock plot.

The Competition opens up with Paul Dietrich (Richard Dreyfuss) winning third place in a midwestern piano competition. You'd think that's pretty good, but there's a glut of would-be concert pianists out there, and third-best in one region isn't quite going to cut it for trying to become a concert pianist. It doesn't help that Paul is the stock character type of the standoffish heterodox player, similar to the sort of cop you see in 70s and 80s police movies, only with the character traits transferred to a classical pianist. He's got a job offer to become a... public school music teacher. Yippee.

His parents suggest he take one last chance, to submit an audition tape to a prestigious competition held every year in San Francisco. They've been subsidizing him to this point, and don't want to see him fail. Paul feels that if he can only come in third in the midwest, how can he win a much bigger national competition. But he enters anyway, since it's the last year he can enter before he reaches the age limit. Besides, he's not so certain he wants to become a school teacher, having seen what it's done to his best friend.

Then there's young Heidi Schoonover (Amy Irving). She clearly comes from a much richer family, and they have the money to have a prestigious music teacher like Greta Vandermann (Lee Remick), who can trace her musical tutlage back to Beethoven, give her one-on-one masterclasses. Heidi isn't certain she's good enough for a competition like the one out in San Francisco, so Greta greases the skids by sending in a tape for Heidi. Unsurprisingly, both Heidi and Paul are selected among the 12 semifinalists, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie.

So our two protagonists make their way out to San Francisco, where they find they've been pitted against a bunch of other stock characters. There's Jerry DiSalvo (Joseph Cali), who looks like he could be the same character John Travolta played in Saturday Night Fever, only moved from disco over to classical music. He figures that the competition might be a good way to get a gig at one of the Las Vegas hotels. I mean, have you seen how much money Liberace makes?. There's a nice enough but slightly odd black guy who thankfully isn't there to go on about racism (I say thankfully because that would have been a supremely easy trap for the screenwriters to fall into); a nondescript guy; and, the other important character Tatjana, a young Soviet pianist who was obviously invited in the spirit of détente. Tatjana and her music teacher are kept on a close leash by their Soviet handlers, but the teacher has been planning this as a way to defect in what is the big subplot of the movie.

I suppose you could technically call it the second subplot. The competition is supposed to be the main plot, but alongside that is the relationship between Paul and Heidi. They apparently know each other from music school days, but Paul has that reputation for being a bit of a rebel and difficult to deal with, and Heidi has certainly had to deal with that before. But you also know that the two are going to fall in (and possibly back out of) love while the competition is going on.

The big problem with The Competition is the extent to which it relies on hoary plot lines and characterizations. The bright spot is the piano music. Now, none of the actors involved could play piano at a competition level, but a music teacher was brought in to train these actors in how to fake it to look like they really were playing the pieces, to a more realistic standard than a lot of other movies and TV shows. The producers hired real up-and-coming pianists to do the actual playing of the concerti in the competition. They didn't get a real conductor, instead casting Sam Wanamaker to play the temperamental (what a surprise) conductor.

If you like classical music, then you'll probably enjoy the classical music scenes in The Competition. Having said that, the rest of the music is terribly dated to late-era disco. Surprisingly, the movie also received an Oscar nomination for the song that plays over the closing credits. I say surprisingly because, as I've mentioned in posts on other movies from 1980, that year was an extremely strong year for original songs and there was a lot that could have gotten the fifth slot over the song here.