Movie Review: "Rent"

It’s not often that a movie is able to fill me to the brim with firey, evil, destructive thoughts. Lately I’ve taken to the habit of practicing chord changes on the guitar while I watch flicks. As I took in the screen adaptation of Rent I kept having visions of throwing my guitar, fret-board first, through the TV, sparks flying and me laughing with villainous ire. In case you haven’t noticed all ready, it pissed me off so much it made me borderline eloquent.

I could have brought heaps of baggage with me to this one. I’ve been a tremendous fan of the musical for several years but I was determined to come into the film with an open mind but still prepared to loathe it. Why was I still prepared to loathe it? Two words: Chris Columbus. The decision to have the director of…wait for it...Mrs. Doubtfire, Nine Months and let’s not forget the seminal Bicentennial Man take on one of the most important, edgy musicals from the past twenty five years is right up there with somebody thinking Jaws IV was a bang-up idea. If I was gonna hate this flick, it was gonna have to be Columbus’ fault, not that of my own attachments.

I hadn’t listened to the musical in its entirety in almost two years. Seriously. There was some baggage that went along with that decision but I thought surely it would allow me to see the film with an open mind. I really wanted to Columbus to prove me wrong. I was ready for some of my favorite sequences to be removed for the sake of the film. I was ready to accept new performers in parts I all ready loved. I armed myself with a couple loads of laundry and a cup of coffee and went to town.

Roger Ebert wrote an interesting review of the film version. He takes it to task mainly for the sins of the story. It’s pretty clear he wasn’t crazy about the musical itself, making it a little tough to like the film. He even rips on La Boheme which was the original source material for Rent. I get his reasoning. From a story stand point, it’s a lot cliché and a little silly. As he put it, “One character coughs in Act III so she can die in Act IV”. You can practically see him rolling his eyes.

In a way he’s right but that’s the film’s fault because it forgets that re-imagining La Boheme in to Rent only works in the first place because the characters are so memorable. I believe Rent works well as a musical and, in the hands of a better director, it might have worked as a film.

That’s said, it’s not all bad, so we’ll start off with the good stuff. Rosario Dawson was outstanding. She’s gorgeous and she takes Mimi to a new level here. Traci Thomas, the other new cast member, is just as good as Joanne. She brings a fresh interpretation of the part and it’s very much welcome. These performances work because they are new and they bring no stage baggage to the screen. The rest of the cast is merely passable in parts they played for ages for that very reason. These are stage performances and it’s so clear it’s painful. Even seasoned screen actors like Jesse Martin and Taye Diggs fall back in to big, bold theater habits that only make for clunky performances. It’s not their fault really. The director (1492 himself) should have reined them in and forced them to pick up new subtleties but no such luck.

Film has an intimacy that theatre, particularly musical theatre, can’t match. This intimacy should bring the audience closer to the all ready wonderful characters in Rent but again this seems lost on Columbus. Moments that should be seen in close up are far too often played out in long masters that suck the energy right out of them. So much of the movie feels like a filmed stage production that it’s maddening. In short, there’s nothing new here.

Take Mark for example. During the musical, we never get the impression that he’s a particularly good filmmaker and we don’t need to. The songs and storylines can handle the progression of his life just fine. In the film however this could have been an opportunity to make the character much more layered. His camera could have been another eye from which the audience could see the world as he sees it. This might have made his revelation near the end of the film all the more powerful.

On the other hand they could have just left it out entirely and taken the approach of the musical. Honestly that might have worked better then what they did, which is turn Mark in to the Bohemian equivalent of an over-excited parent with a video camera. The “film” he claims to be working on is little more then a home movie. He’s supposed to be shooting a documentary about the homeless, so Columbus mixes in a few shots of homeless people doing homeless people things. It’s trite and insulting.

Columbus tries so hard to keep fans of the musical happy that he ends up with movie/theatre soup. Sure they kept all the big numbers and cut some others. They changed up some locations and messed with the time line a little. These kinds of changes are necessary any time a story is moved from one medium to another but they should be the right changes. The one that should drive even the most tepid fans of the musical bats are the lines which are sung on stage but spoken on screen. Okay, so you’re not making an opera. You wanna ground the musical in a little reality. I get that but do people speak in rhyme? Would it have been so hard to change those lines up just a little?! A line like “I’m giving up my vices” works when sung by Mimi but by having her speak it, you pull the audience right out of the movie. If a friend of mine, crack addict or not, actually said that, I’d laugh at them.

I cannot recommend this film to anybody and particularly not to real fans of the musical. I won’t say that it’s completely without merit but it’s pretty damn close. This is a version of Rent stripped of everything that made it important. It is bland, desolate and worst of all safe. It is another example, like the first two Harry Potter films, of Chris Columbus being so eager to please a rabid fan base that he completely misses the point.

Links:

Here's Ebert's Review

Here's some good info on the musical from the Wikipedia Crack Pipe

This is the website for the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation


Okay, that's it for today. I'm off to run errands but before I go I wanna wish my mom a HAPPY BIRTHDAY! She turns OLD today!

See you tomorrow!