‘Tina’ is uplifted by a powerhouse performance
“Tina” — 2 stars
Sometimes a two-star rating means the critic thinks a movie is simply average across the board. At other times, the rating is truly an average, balancing the good parts of a film against the less good parts. So it is with “Tina” (“Mother”), an inspirational drama from New Zealand.
Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.
The star performance comes from Anapela Polataivao as Mareta Percival, a middle-aged Polynesian music teacher who has lost her groove after a family tragedy early in the movie. Before that, “Miss Percival” was a force of nature for her students in a poor Christchurch neighborhood, but three years after the event, she still has the breath knocked out of her. Ironically, depressive cynicism makes her more interesting as a character, and Polataivao gives the role a darkly humorous snap that has a viewer sitting up and paying attention.
A social worker nephew (Beulah Koale) gets her an interview to be a substitute teacher at St. Francis, a rigid private school for upper-class “Pakeha” (white) students, and Mareta’s brutal honesty endears her to the outgoing principal (Dalip Sondhi) while stiffening the back of the new head (Jamie Irvine), a barely disguised racist. The script by Magasiva and Mario Gaoa is bighearted and earnest while hanging placards on all the characters, assigning their moral positions so we won’t miss a thing.
Similarly, when Miss Percival meets Sophie (Antonia Robinson), a shy student with scars from an unidentified accident and the voice of an angel, it’s only a matter of time before she grudgingly decides to start a school choir and draft the reluctant Sophie as its star vocalist. The participation of Anthony (Zac O’Meagher), an unassuming school BMOC, swells the ranks of the chorus, and St. Francis eventually heads to a national competition against all the odds the school administration can throw at the kids and their choir leader.
It’s not that “Tina” tells an overly familiar story — predictability can be very enjoyable when it’s served with enthusiasm and faith in the audience. But the movie both skimps on the details (the choir goes from sounding like a musical train wreck to harmonic perfection in no time) and piles on the dramatic complications well past the point of no return, with medical crises, drug overdoses, schoolyard punch-ups and more — lots more — all leading to a finale at the “Big Sing” that hammers mercilessly on a viewer’s tear ducts. An end credits dedication to “our beloved Pua” implies that Magasiva is basing his story on actual events, but true isn’t always the same as believable.
However, Polataivao brings such a comically sharp-tongued sense of weariness to the part of the music teacher that she almost rights this listing ship on her own, and she makes Miss Percival enough of a spiky individualist to dispel any lingering odor of “inspirational ethnic educator teaching the white kids how to have soul” boilerplate. The actress is one of two reasons to attend to “Tina” despite the movie’s increasing resort to schmaltz.
The other reason is the music on the soundtrack — traditional Samoan songs arranged by the renowned composer-musicologist Tuilagi Igelese Ete (“Moana”) and sung by the Western Samoa Teachers’ Training College Choir. Those numbers are gorgeous enough to elevate the movie and its audience to a higher ground all by themselves. The original soundtrack for “Tina” is available on streaming platforms. It offers all the drama of the film and, thankfully, less.
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At theaters. Unrated, but contains adult language, teen problems and racial bigotry. 124 minutes.