Having been a high school theater geek once, Rent holds a special place in my heart. This young suburbanite owes her initiation into the world of bohemia to Rent; I got my budding adult education to the tune of "Seasons of Love."
So, when I heard my beloved rock opera was being turned into a movie, I found occasion to climb up on my shaky, teenaged soapbox again and decry the commercialism, the historical disrespect, even the immorality of such a venture.
"Making Rent into a movie?!" I yelped. "What post-millennial bulls**t. I can't think of a more 2005 thing to do with a musical that defines the early 90s! If Rent was the swansong of bohemia, this film will be dancing on its grave!"
I'm waiting for the abridged soundtrack to show up on the music shelves at Starbucks -- just in time for Christmas.
Luckily, this terrible film avoids saying anything about bohemia at all. Unfortunately, most movie-going audiences won't know any better.
Before pointing out the burdens (under which the film bends and breaks) of translating a piece of theater into a movie, a quick synopsis:
Mark and Roger, struggling filmmaker and musician, respectively, live together in a crummy apartment in Alphabet City. It is Christmas Eve; their friend, Collins, a computer-age philosopher, gets mugged while trying to pay them a visit. Angel, a drag queen, rescues him, and they fall in love. Meanwhile, Mark's ex-girlfriend, Maureen, and her girlfriend, Joann, prepare for Maureen's performance protest. Benny, an old-friend-turned-yuppie wants to stop the protest and develop the building into cyber commercial space. Mimi, a drug-addicted stripper, falls in love with Roger, who has just come off a year of heroin withdrawal. Roger, Collins, Angel and Mimi are all HIV-positive.
The show spans a year, all 525,600 minutes of it, and the drama and music are on an epic scale. With memorable numbers, now-famous melodies and clever recitative, Rent the musical is a lavish exploration of many of the flannel-clad tropes that today seem trite but were once radical.
Rent the film, however, feels more like a series of illogical gestures and awkward backbends that attempt to squeeze the musical's 90s persona into the shiny silver box of the big screen.
The movie never solves the issue of performance medium. Without the layer of theatricality present in adaptations like Chicago, the film's realistic approach has characters straining through choreography as if looking movie audiences directly in the eye -- it's exposed and painful to watch.
The only number that comes off decently is "La Vie Boheme," because the movie builds in someone to perform for. The cast energetically, if cheesily, chants "To sodomy, it's between God and me!" for Benny and his gang of three-piece suits in the convincingly rendered Life Café.
There's little such respite, however. Maureen's "Over the Moon" piece is performed as if for a group of third graders. The movie is shot like a bad music video, with Roger's three-minute trip to a Santa Fe mountaintop especially egregious. Numbers like "Santa Fe" capture none of the longing, the misery, the humanity of what should be a very human musical. With all the grinning and feigned theatrical energy, I wanted to stand up and shout "It's about AIDS, for Chrissake!"
Worse, while lacking sufficient compassion for the very real crisis underlying Rent, the movie milks scenes like Angel's funeral and the Life Support meetings. While I once cried my 14-year-old eyes out over Rent, the movie's scenes were vacuous and cheap.
What's disappointing is how hard director Chris Columbus appears to have worked trying to recreate the magic that gained Rent a cult following as a theater piece. Columbus held cast meetings in the actual Life Café on 10th and Avenue B to try to evoke composer Jonathan Larsen's vision.
But the problem with a "No day but today" ideal is that eventually, there will be another day, and ... it's arrived. This poorly done film hardly avoids the show's inevitable expiration date. A more historical perspective (even a premature one) could've helped, but as it stands, the film is a deflated nod to the past. It goes through the motions, but it's not Rent. Not the way I remember it anyway; not the way it should be remembered.
Hopefully, the film won't be influential enough to stab another knife in already sputtering and choking bohemia. Which is still alive, by the way. It's just living in a terrarium called the American theater. Trying to translate the ideal into a Sony Pictures film is, well, post-millennial bulls**t.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
