Patsy Cline. Loretta Lynn. Gwyneth Paltrow.
If you buy that progression, you’ll buy “Country Strong,” an unintentionally campy drama in which Paltrow, as broken-down country superstar Kelly Canter — a singer so popular she has a logo — rambles forth waving empty Smirnoff bottles and smearing her mascara.
Emerging from rehab, Kelly has undergone a vaguely defined trauma that isn’t fully explained till the end (which doesn’t save it from sounding absurd). An orderly at her clinic, an aspiring country singer named Beau (Garrett Hedlund of “Tron: Legacy”) has been helping her get sober, mostly by helping her get horizontal.
Despite catching the two of them eye-bonking each other in the clinic, her manager husband (Tim McGraw) invites Beau to come along as an opening act for her comeback tour. To stir the pot, and because superstars have such a hard time finding opening acts, he also brings a nervous little amateur, Chiles Stanton (an adorable Leighton Meester). She wants to be the next Carrie Underwood, though she hasn’t yet mastered the skill of singing in public without freaking out.
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The movie starts out well enough, mainly because it relies heavily on a series of convincing country songs and Meester out-acts Paltrow by nailing the calculated sweetness of her character. She’s a girl who, when you call her “Country Barbie,” says “Thank you!” and means it.
But it’s hard to buy Paltrow as a product of Pigslop, Texas, who says things like, “I ain’t never had a man be so gennull with me.” This isn’t “Crazy Heart.” The “dramatic” scenes are hilarious. I tried not to laugh when Paltrow wallows, stricken, on her hotel bed in a fur coat listening to Patsy Cline or empties her guts into a trash barrel. But I failed.
Maybe Sandra Bullock, with a better director, could have pulled this off. But Gwyneth, with her steely abs, does not look like she’s been through the wringer. She looks like she doesn’t even know where the wringer is and would have to check with the maid to find out.
Writer-director Shana Feste, who last year did the woeful family drama “The Greatest,” has only an approximate sense of country ways, showing Kelly joyriding on the boxcar of a freight train. I can’t quite picture Shania Twain or Faith Hill doing that, except in a music video, but then again, no one has done it since about 1937.
Feste also thinks country means daddy’s in prison (Chiles seems to be the offspring of two hardened criminals) and that, in the interest of keeping it real, you’re really better off doing true-country in front of a crowd of several rather than putting on makeup and making hit records.
Love and fame, goes the moral, can’t live in the same place. But lots of famous people have successful marriages, from Bono to Leno. “Country Strong” merely shows that love and severe alcoholism have irreconcilable differences. We knew that: Loretta Lynn told us so in “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind).”
Not that there’s a lot of love in the movie, except in speeches. At times Kelly seems attached to her lightly sinister husband, but mostly they’re cool to each other. The hubby shrugs it off when he sees her walk out of Beau’s hotel room wearing only a towel (instead of her clothes, which she’s carrying). Later he slugs Beau — so is he jealous or not? If so, why did he invite Beau on tour? Is he more interested in little Chiles — Kelly 2.0? And why doesn’t Kelly — or her husband — seem jealous when Chiles and Beau start to make like Johnny Cash and June Carter together?
Maybe no one really cares about anyone, which is why they say things like, “Maybe we should stop this — you’re married already, you know?” This is supposed to be a country movie. Shouldn’t somebody say something like, “I can’t take your body if your heart’s not in it”?