Holiday treacle heavy in ‘August’

“August Rush” feels like the cinematic equivalent of being stuffed with fruitcake and doused with a gallon of egg nog, so if that’s the sort of thing you go in for around the holidays . . . Freddie Highmore (“Finding Neverland”) stars as a Dickensian orphan with an ear so prodigious that he can hear the music in everything.

This talent doesn’t exactly make him popular at the orphanage, where listening to the wheat with your arms outstretched and an ecstatic smile on your face is grounds for a solid beating. But little Evan is staunch. He’s convinced that if he listens hard enough, he’ll hear his parents, and if he ever learns how to play an instrument, they’ll hear him and they’ll all be reunited.

You can probably guess what happens next, though you’d never guess about the Robin Williams character. (There’s just no foretelling Robin Williams.) The movie flashes back 10 years to Evan’s parents’ first and only meeting on a moonlit rooftop near Washington Square.

Lyla (Keri Russell) has just performed with the New York Philharmonic. Louis (Jonathan Rhys Myers) has just played with his band at a small New York club, where the fans inexplicably cheer right through the songs with their hands aloft, as they often do in movies and never in real life. In what seems like a mere instant, probably because it pretty much is, they meet, fall in love, consummate the relationship, conceive a child and are wrenched violently asunder by evil forces, a.k.a. Lyla’s evil stage dad.

Thus having established each of the family member’s coordinates, “August Rush” spends the rest of the movie following them on their various goose chases, motivated not by what they don’t know about one another’s existences but by the music -- the music they can hear but nobody else can.

After meeting a benevolent (and musically sympathetic) child welfare worker, Evan runs away from the boys home to New York City where he happens to meet a 10-year-old busking prodigy named Arthur (Leon Thomas III) in Washington Square. Arthur leads him to the lair of one Wizard (Williams), a Faginesque former musician who lives off the musical talents of his young, errant wards, and after Wizard gets a hold of Evan’s incredible guitar-slapping abilities (he learns to play it like a bongo in a single night), he gives the coveted Washington Square spot to him, gives him a snappy new name (August Rush) and pegs his dreams of abusive music manager moguldom on him.

How absurd is Williams in this role? He makes “Patch Adams” look like a good career move.

Fate intervenes, of course, but only in the most preposterous ways imaginable. And even the most matter-of-fact scenes are saddled with dialogue so consistently on the nose, you swear the nose will require resetting.

Written by Nick Castle and James V. Hart and directed by Kirsten Sheridan, “August Rush” is a saccharine holiday pill promoting the importance of family (even when your family are strangers), the value of listening and the possible suggestion that musicians should think before they breed.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

“August Rush.” MPAA rating: PG for some thematic elements, mild violence and language. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. In wide release.