Friday, July 25, 2014

Our Critic Says "Jersey Boys" Movie Soars

Like Frankie Valli’s falsetto, Jersey Boys soars. You know between the interstices of the brain where a snappy tune sticks, once heard, and you keep hearing it in your head?   Jersey Boys will do that to you, as it recreates the hits and tells the story of the boys from New Jersey in a smart and stylish way. 
Based on the Broadway hit and directed by Clint Eastwood, with a solid cast of actor/singers, Jersey Boys is pleasing to the eyes and ears.    There’s not a weak performance in the lot, with some standouts such as Vincent Piazza as the selfish but charismatic Tommy DeVito, Erich Bergen as hitmaker Bob Gaudio, Michael Lomenda as the amiable Nick Massi, and of course John Lloyd Young as Frankie Valli, he of the big range and the acting chops to match.    Then there’s Mike Doyle as music producer Bob Crewe and in a lesser but pivotal role, Christopher Walken as Gyp DeCarlo, lending gravitas as local mob guy and father figure to Valli.
The Jersey accents and the strong characterizations are supported by the look of the film - the huge finned cars, the smoky little clubs, the unkempt streets of the old neighbourhood, the slick shiny suits of the men.  We see the clash of egos, money troubles and carelessness that lead directly to mob involvement, family angst and tragedy.  Despite the busyness, Eastwood makes us care about each of the characters.   In a film about the rise of a group of four young men, with a bevy of discarded band names before they light upon “the 4 Seasons” taken from the name of a local bowling alley, family decidedly takes a back seat – the strongest relationships shown are those between band members.  We get an idea of the human cost of touring and promoting.  Wives, lovers and children are afterthoughts to stardom.   It had me wondering what the family members of the band felt about their success and the dynamics between the members of the group. 
As a Broadway musical, breaking down the fourth wall conceit with characters periodically addressing the audience likely went over like gangbusters, but at first it was a bit disconcerting to have the band members talk to the camera at certain points, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that recreating these moments from the musical were even necessary.   However, that’s a minor quibble and it did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the story. There’s some clever or sly references:   at Valli’s parents’ home, the Pope and Frank Sinatra are literally framed equally and reverentially, in side-by-side photos, the other a scene where Joe is watching TV in a hotel room and who should pop up but something starring a young and virile Clint Eastwood.
The performances are high energy and will make you go to the Internet to see if Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons were rightly captured in their glory days. Recommended, but be warned – you will have the lyrics to ‘Sherry’ or “Big Girls Don’t Cry’  stuck in your brain for a week.



Joaquin Phoenix Shines in "The Immigrant" Movie

The Immigrant is a surprisingly generic title for what is essentially an old-fashioned morality play, ostensibly the story of a young Polish girl who comes to the New World in the twenties with her sister. Grey New York awaits if she can get out of immigration prison and spring her ill sister out of hospital. Almost immediate aid comes in the form of friendly, helpful Bruno, who seems to have some kind of pull with the immigration officials and gets our sad-eyed immigrant out of detention. 
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Bruno,has a few good opportunities to shine (he can move from kindness to fury in a nano-second, and excels as the carny-like host of the burlesque) and one speculates whether the story should have focused instead on his tortured journey. As it is, we get a glimpse of a provocative character but not much more. 
The immigrant story, psychologically, is a rich vein to mine - what quiet or unquiet stories, what individual mind sets lead to someone taking the big step of leaving what they know for new and uncharted worlds?
Alas, I kept waiting for the drama to emerge from behind the shadow play. What we get instead are stock characters. Friendly Bruno turns out to be a pimp who uses a tawdry burlesque show to get customers for his girls.  His kindness turns to menace quickly but then dissipates. 
Marion Cotillard as Ewa is the archetypal heroine whose selfless devotion to her sister and purity seem to be borrowed from cinematic tropes of earlier times. 
It's not the actress's fault that the character seems so bloodless ‎ and passive.   Even when she's on stage and faced with crude insults, she is played as a martyr, stoic in the face of pain. Maybe the movie should have been called The Icon for it never tries to elevate itself above wooden depictions of character. We are supposed to believe in these characters but they seem curiously flat, and as a consequence you don't really find any moral ambiguity in their individual choices, or are persuaded of the redemptive power of love, or forgiveness, as depicted here.
Like the burlesque show Bruno hosts, it's all a pretty come-on. We get a magician, and the great Caruso, for goodness sakes! 
I would have rather had less sleight of hand and more authenticity though, for at bottom if you are going to make a film about The Immigrant, you need to show the dirt beneath the nails, not airbrush the squalor or the desperation,  with genteel sepia overtones.  
‎I won't say the actors are wasted but with the kind of talent they each possess, one waited for the film that could have been.