

“I lacked the basic talent of not shaking,” she tells Henry, simultaneously piquing his interest and arousing our skepticism.

And it helps even more if the lead performances are as subtly affecting as those offered here by Patrick Stewart as Henry Cole, a celebrated musician who finds himself increasingly stressed by stage fright late in his decades-long career, and Katie Holmes as Helen Morrison, a thirtysomething (or thereabouts) writer for The New Yorker who wants to profile Cole as he warily launches his first concert tour in years.Įarly on, when she approaches him backstage after a Manhattan performance, Helen reveals that her own musical ambitions ended abruptly during her youth after she crashed and burned at a piano competition. It helps a lot if the drama is as low-key and credible as “Coda,” a deliberately paced and stealthily involving saunter through familiar territory.
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Ironically, a similar question could be asked about the movie itself: Do we really need another drama about an aged artist who’s reinvigorated, professionally and personally, by a free-spirited and much younger woman? “Do we actually need another recording of the Goldberg Variations?” The question, at once impudently cheeky and playfully taunting, is posed in “ Coda” by the long-time manager and friend of a world-famous classical pianist during an intimate outdoor lunch with, among others, his bemused client.
