On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Professions of Love By Raphael Shargel The movie musical is making a comeback, albeit gropingly. Convinced today's audiences will not line up for the sort of confections...
...It was also a posthumous triumph for composer-lyricist Jonathan Larson, who died shortly before opening night...
...The rent has gone unpaid for months...
...Although he is well known for covering the work of other songwriters, Cash was prolific himself, particularly in the first decade of his career...
...Does Larson expect us to rejoice with Roger that he can now bed his admirer without guilt...
...But here, after he lays her to rest on a table, Mimi's hands twitch...
...And while Mimi puts on a nightly show, it would be stretching it to call her an artist...
...Rent fails to treat issues of life and death with the seriousness they deserve...
...To its credit, Rent never feels stagebound, and Joaquin Phoenix, who stars in Walk the Line, avoids turning a celebrity into a caricature, as Jamie Foxx did in Ray, last year's musical biopic...
...No indication is given that it was written by Bob Dylan...
...Low-toned and gravelly voiced even in his youth, he injected his delivery with ironic bemusement and a sensitivity to the nuanced moods of his material...
...Itnever did...
...A love story lies at the heart of each film, even if the passions are underdeveloped and sometimes bewildering...
...This might be forgivable if the characters, however beautiful and modishly dressed, were less contemptible...
...Mark spends the year making a documentary film, but the fragments we see seem more like an amateur music video...
...The depiction of their lifestyle borders on the absurd...
...Larson relishes the frenzy of protest yet evinces little interest in its consequences...
...An unchanged Cash wins June in the end by wearing her down...
...The only upsetting idea at play is the notion that the community of the doomed is an elite and exclusive group, that the death sentences delivered by addiction and AIDS are desirable status symbols...
...Bennet (Donald Sutherland) has none of the stunning passive aggressiveness he shows in the novel...
...Mimi dies in her lover's arms...
...Nevertheless, the Johnny Cash story is more substantial and enjoyable...
...They supposedly live for their art, but clearly none of them are working very hard...
...Should we really be happy for Mimi that her smack habit is compounded by illness...
...Phoenix is an adequate singer, but he lacks the power and resonance of the man he portrays...
...Though we meet Elvis and the Sun gang, Cash's relationship to his fellow musicians is treated perfunctorily...
...The songs' hard-core sound and puerile lyrics never suggest irony...
...as the film begins, he still has not completed his first work...
...Shortly, they are passionately kissing...
...If Manhattan's overburdened tenants really behaved this way, fat-cat landlords like Benny would surely have to make some concessions, or call the police to protect their property...
...Mangold might have been wise to make her story the film's focal point rather than Cash's...
...But those are minor quibbles in the face of the moving romance at the center of Pride and Prejudice...
...Instead, the film devotes most of its running time to dredging up the same clichés that help sink Renr...
...Meanwhile another friend, a drunk known as Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), falls in love with the drag queen Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia)—both also HIV positive, though the film never deals with the circumstances that led to this fate...
...Set between the Christmases of 1989 and 1990, it con cerns the effects of drug addiction and AIDS upon a group of friends in downtown Manhattan...
...Rent's most bizarre exchange occurs as Mimi sidles up to Roger while the rest of the gang is singing "La Vie Boheme...
...Taking in large vistas, his stolid camera creates a trite picture-postcard effect, but in interior scenes—where stillness would be preferable—it galumphs about distractingly...
...They feel responsible for themselves and others only when it is convenient...
...Convinced today's audiences will not line up for the sort of confections Busby Berkeley or Vincente Minnelli turned out, filmmakers are working their way toward a product suitable to the new century Rent, based on Jonathan Larson's Tony-winning Broadway show, and Walk the Line, about the life of country singer Johnny Cash, want desperately to soar...
...It never occurs to her that Benny would be easier to topple if she got the others involved as well...
...It treats addiction and the scourge of AIDS as external forces that affect the lives of the principals as randomly as a natural disaster...
...A number of Rent's shortcomings also afflict Walk the Line...
...Darcy, the quintessential hero of the romance novel, is dour and spiteful when we first meet him...
...Visually, Wright's manipulation of the wide screen leaves much to be desired...
...The musical number "La Vie Boheme" conveys the conventionality of their passions—the reverse of what it intends— and ends up an unintentional paean to the way commercial culture has appropriated the so-called "alternative" scene...
...To the vehement title song, they pour out of the buildings, shaking their fists and setting fire to their eviction notices...
...Perish the thought that a Hollywood movie should represent a record studio in a bad light...
...A few of the characterizations are flattened, too...
...In the real world, the culture Larson portrays bred activists...
...The two new films falter, however, in linking upbeat musical content to the complex issues they raise and betray...
...But Elizabeth comes to perceive the generous nature beneath his scowl, and he overcomes his initial contempt for her family and connections...
...Sadly, we do not hear Cash's voice on the soundtrack until the closing credits...
...Witherspoon's June is strong-willed and sensible, witty and morally astute, the Southern gentleman's fantasy of a perfect wife...
...Roger, like Rudolfo, cries out her name as he embraces her limp body...
...The two most remarkable things about Cash are his striking vocals and his songwriting style...
...Shooting through windows and doorways, he interjects an inappropriate note of voyeurism...
...Its rendering of Elizabeth and Darcy goes beyond smoldering sexual tension...
...Bennet (Brenda Blethyn) is more than a harridan and her Lady Catherine (Judi Dench) more than a harpy...
...Columbus, fresh from directing the visually muddy first two installments of the Harn' Potter series, has no feel for contemporary New York...
...Austen's Mrs...
...After it opened, critics praised it as "cheeky," while Austen's fans found it a travesty of the book...
...And since Phoenix's Cash is no gentleman, and married to boot, she keeps her distance despite his repeated professions of love...
...But in the film, the riot disperses when the song is over and all retire peacefully to their apartments as abruptly as they rose up...
...The film deserves to be celebrated because it accomplishes the opposite of what its detractors have charged...
...These two people, through their mutual attraction and misunderstandings, find within each other something not only to love but also to admire...
...Other outbursts later on end with similarly inexplicable suddenness...
...In one of Walk the Line's most memorable sequences, Cash sings "It Ain Me Babe" at a concert his wife Vivian (Ginnifer Godwin) tends...
...Benny threatens but never manages to evict them...
...Collins (Tom Hollander) nor the grandeur of the wealthy Mr...
...He rejects her for the umpteenth time...
...Cash was the king of the well-made song: "Cry, Cry, Cry," "Train of Love," "Next in Line," "I Still Miss Someone," and "I Walk the Line" are masterpieces of economy built on simple melodies and lyrics, each successive verse enhancing the meaning of the chorus...
...The five Bennet sisters have been reimagined as a gaggle of giggling girls...
...Fittingly, it is about overcoming first impressions...
...But on screen nearly a decade hence, this retelling of Puccini's La Bohème seems superficial and pretentious...
...It is difficult to root for characters uninhibitedly driven toward self-destruction, portrayed by actors with little chemistry together...
...So while we understand Cash's obsession with June, we sympathize with her refusal to become a homewrecker and her insistence, once Cash becomes free to marry her, that he clean up his act...
...Their respective directors, Chris Columbus and James Mangold, repudiate the tiresome MTV-esque pyrotechniques of their recent predecessors Moulin Rouge...
...Witherspoon's straight-and-narrow sensibility is so winning that it is disappointing when she finally does consent to marry her suitor...
...Self-immolating glee persists through the final scene, when Puccini's plot is picked up only to be commercialized...
...Only once do we find him in conversation with Sam Phillips orthebosses at Columbia...
...What are we to make of this...
...it is nerveless enough to make one wonder why Benny bothers to obstruct it...
...Puccini's original embraces a tender tragedy Larson cynically evades...
...I went to see it reluctantly, and I was taken aback by the liveliness of the opening...
...We know Mimi must die, but her death is deflected because musicals are supposed to have happy endings...
...Until last year's Vanity Fair, the actress took mostly fluff roles, but lately she seems determined to achieve something higher...
...Although no one in it sings a note, Joe Wright's new version of Pride and Prejudice reaches the romantic heights the musicals aim for...
...In an early number the neighborhood does rise up: Everyone in Mark and Roger's building and the next-door tower confesses they have been unable to pay the landlord...
...Mark Cohen (Anthony Rapp), standing in for Puccini's Marcello, and Roger Davis (Adam Pascal), an updated Rudolfo, are artists dwelling in a tenement owned by Benny (Taye Diggs...
...Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen...
...Of the three, Rent is the most ambitious, and offensive...
...Mature enough not to be enthralled by the power of her suitors, she succumbs to neither the convenience of marrying the well-off but puling Mr...
...During Witherspoon's long absences, the picture often sleeps...
...She confesses that she too must take an AZT break...
...Walk the Line hangs all Cash's misery on the loss of an older brother who died when they were young, yet a single trauma cannot account for the inner torment Phoenix relays...
...As in the opera...
...The lyrics fit the couple's estrangement and allude to his passion for bandmate June Carter (Reese Witherspoon...
...He weathered the rock'n'roll revolution better than any other country music artist, writing and recording profusely until his death in 2003...
...These are bohemians of the Dr Pepper generation...
...his alleged bohemi ans are not serious about changing society...
...Rent's characters wallow in their personal tragedies and indulge in late-night binging, as if the shadow of death grants them a license for hedonism...
...During the final decade of his life, despite a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease that stopped him from performing live, Cash released a string of albums that added to his legacy and popularity...
...When this rock-out show opened on Broadway in 1996, it was received as a liberating exercise in matters previously taboo...
...Even though the film necessarily simplifies many of the novel's characters and some of its plot, it remains faithful to the spirit of the work...
...Perhaps Larson feared his characters would alienate audiences if they were actually invested in a struggle...
...In the novel, older sisters Jane (Rosamund Pike) and Elizabeth (Keira Kmghtley) behave more soberly than they do here, but the adolescent boisterousness director Joe Wright depicts is very credible and melds perfectly with the wit Elizabeth displays on the page...
...One of the most fascinating pop music performers of the last 50 years, Cash began his career alongside future superstars like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis at Sam Phillips' legendary Sun Records studio in Nashville...
...The filmmakers, however, appear indifferent to whether a song is Cash's own or someone else's...
...Many of the dance scenes are little more than dash and blur...
...Unlike Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth in the acclaimed 1995 BBC television miniseries, Knightley's modestly graceful heroine does not fancy herself the belle of the ball, the center of her world's or the camera's attention...
...2001)and Chicago (2002...
...Maureen's "protest" trails off into nonsense about cows' udders...
...Now Roger is jubilant: He need no longer worry about infecting his beloved, who is already a casualty...
...The love story fares better, thanks to the wonderful Witherspoon...
...Roger calls himself a songwriter...
...Following a series of hits—including the tune that lends the film its title—he left for Columbia Studios, where he recorded for several troubled decades...
...The repetitions become tedious— scene after scene of the singer, high or in withdrawal, staggering about, lashing out at his loved ones—because there is little apparent motive for his drive toward selfdestruction...
...Mimi Marquez (Rosario Dawson), a gorgeous stripper and junkie, tries to seduce Roger, who is interested but spurns her because he is ashamed to admit he is HIV positive...
...Its chief concerns are Cash and Carter's love story and his drug addiction...
...Tellingly, when Maureen, the only character with a social conscience, stages a one-woman show attacking Benny's business practices, she calls it "my protest," suggesting this political statement is valuable simply because it is hers...
...We glimpse some familiar landmarks, but missing are the vividness and vitality that characterized the Gotham of On the Town in the 1940s or Fame in the '70s...
...She rises, her fever breaks, and within seconds she is well enough tojoin the otherplayers in ecstatic song...
...Mark is carrying a torch for performance artist Maureen Johnson (Idina Menzel), who has left him for lawyer Joanne Jefferson (Tracie Thorns), though Maureen proves incapable of remaining faithful to anyone for long...
...Godwin's Vivian comes across as loyal and loving, but unable to cope with Cash's long absences and decadent habits...
...By contrast, Pride and Prejudice is a delight from beginning to end...
...Jane's beauty is palpable, yet the goodness the author attributes to her is wanting...
...Months ago when the previews began, I dreaded the thought of sitting through yet another adaptation of Jane Austen's novel...
...As it progressed, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop...
...During the song, they celebrate the radical nature of their tastes, which extend to figures as taboo as Stephen Sondheim and institutions as transgressive as the Village Voice...
...His vision of the city is closer to a tourist's than a native's...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
