For the last twenty years or so, from Unforgiven to Million Dollar
Baby and J. Edgar, Clint
Eastwood’s directorial efforts have been clearly the works of an old man. I
don’t mean that negatively. His movies have had a clean, classical design to
their studied shots. They have deliberate rhythms, a confident relaxed quality
to the patient way they unfold, a spare simplicity to the way scenes linger,
playing quietly and earnestly. His color palate has grown increasingly pale,
production design draped in stillness and shadow, with lighting often funeral
parlor dim. With his latest film Jersey
Boys, an adaptation of the high-energy Broadway jukebox musical based on
the 1960s rise of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, he brings down the tempo
to match his style. On stage the show is fast and flashy. Here it’s downbeat,
full of sad reality, contract disputes, and flawed individuals who, despite
obvious talents, make it big through luck and timing more than anything. It’s a
perspective, earned weary cynicism, only an 84-year-old who has spent 60 years
in showbiz could have.
Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice adapt their own work on the
musical into a screenplay that turns the interplay between narrative and song
into a straight-ahead musical biopic. It clumsily but cleverly relies upon an
audience’s prior understanding of its subgenre’s mechanics and prior knowledge
that The Four Seasons were a big deal. It contains shorthand weddings and
funerals, wives and mistresses, agents and temptations, sudden success and
long-building breakups. It has a scene where the four guys stand around needing
a new name for their band when, with a zap, a neon bowling alley sign flickers
to life. “The Four Seasons,” it says. It’s a sign, get it? Later, they’re stuck
for ideas when their producer happens to say, “big girls don’t cry.” Boom. In a
cut, they’re singing their hit song of that name. It’s so earnestly turns on
clichés it’s almost a self-aware wink. (Speaking of winks, Eastwood puts
himself in the period context, as a TV playing an episode of Rawhide is turned off as his youthful
head fills its screen.)
This mild self-awareness is in keeping with the one theatrical
quality that makes it to the screen. The four band members narrate the story. A
standard scene will move along normally when one of the guys steps out of the
scene, turns to the camera, and tells us how they see it. This approach solves
a big problem biopics can have where the characters go around acting like
they’ve already read the history books on the matter. These characters actually
do know what happens. They step aside and confide in us, youthful stand-ins for
elderly memories. First we meet Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), who tells us
about his youthful criminal conduct outside of Newark. When not in jail, he has
a band – with a mob benefactor (Christopher Walken) – that plays small local
gigs and asks his buddy Frankie (John Lloyd Young) to step in as lead singer.
One thing leads to another. They invite a songwriter (Eirch Bergen) to help
them cut demos of original material. He picks up the narration for a while as
the group struggles for a spell before finally catching a lucky break.
It’s smooth sailing for a while, until Tommy’s shady mob
connections catch up to them, at which point their bass player (Michael
Lomenda) takes over the story. The movie doubles back two years to reveal the
sailing wasn’t as smooth as the earlier narrators spun it. Eastwood and his
screenwriters aren’t rigorously committed to the point-of-view structure,
allowing for dramatic developments in any character’s life to occur whenever
they want regardless of whether or not the current narrator would’ve known. Still,
it’s a sometimes-effective structure that, at best, manages to inhabit clichés
and bust through them in the same moment. What’s curious is the way this
production’s flatlined energy manages to create a sense of weary reminiscences.
The story of the band’s success doesn’t once contain a spark of excitement or
sense of discovery. It’s slow and resigned. It’s not a movie that exists in
present tense. It takes its cue from the narrators and views the events as if
shot through the mists of time, squinting to remember details.
The original Broadway cast plays the band, a completely
ridiculous idea when they’re playing 16, but much better when in their 30s and
40s. They sing and dance to all the old hits – “Sherry,” “Walk Like a Man,”
“Rag Doll,” and more – but off stage are low-key. They relax too far into the
material, unlike Walken, who realizes Eastwood’s approach will require more
energy on the performer’s part to enliven the proceedings. Their individual
traits remain broadly sketched, partly a function of the writing. Isn’t it
funny how biopics can make real individuals into stock stereotypes? At times,
this one gets closer to musician bio-parody Walk
Hard than anything else in the subgenre. But the cultural specificity of
their hometown Italian Catholic New Jersey milieu, a place where the Pope and Frank
Sinatra had equal regard, has a broad sense of place that helps ground their sleepy characterizations. When, by the end, the guys show up in dodgy old-age makeup,
warmly happy to sing again, there’s a sense that the movie we watched was their
way of burying the past, making sense of their own story in Hollywood terms.
I found it largely kitsch and cliché, but
half-moving in its own peculiar way. I was quite taken with these final scenes,
where a swivel of the camera and a smooth edit takes us from the elderly makeup
to youthful vigor. Frankie, at long last, speaks directly to the camera, his
thoughts the only mystery throughout. It’s syrupy and poignant. The music
swells. Cut to black. Then there’s a bright backlot musical sequence, a fantasy
reunion/curtain call of sorts, that’s the best scene in the picture. It is lovely
artifice, suggesting the ultimate showbiz honor is to have messy lives subsumed
totally and thus be immortalized by movie fakery.
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