Betty Plotnick (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bettyp) wrote,@ 2005-11-30 10:42:00 |
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my first angel
I could do a post about Thanksgiving (so, so much vodka) or about last week's VMars (how can Duncan be so screwed up and yet so boring at the same time? mamma's gonna need some things from RadioShack, bwah! Logan/Eli -- nobody can try to have you killed like your ex-boyfriend, know what I mean?) or the way that my love of X-Files has finally paid off for me by making me look both smart and interesting in front of my 3000 professor (thanks, Darrin Morgan!) -- but no, there is no time for that. This post will be all about Rent.
First of all, you know, I liked it. I say this because, as you probably all know, most of the time being a geek for something means you complain about it A LOT, and I plan to complain a lot. I love Rent so very, very much, that pretty much two things were guaranteed to happen for me in the movie: A) I was going to be blissed out by it, and 2) I was going to pick it to fucking death.
I think, first, that I'll tackle the movie character-by-character, and then think about some of the structural changes and whatnot.Who knows? Here goes I will also try not to think I'm being witty by throwing in random lyric quotes. Bad Betty.
ADAM PASCAL/ROGER:
I just want to get this out of the way up front; this was the only performance I wasn't particularly chuffed by. He still has a really strong voice, but somehow, even after all those years (because of all those years?), he didn't seem to have a lot to bring *to* Roger, acting-wise. Compared to a lot of the others, he seemed, weirdly, to be both over-indulgent as a singer and under-expressive as an actor, and I was really just not that impressed. Roger is a critical and sort of complicated character (inasmuch as you can do complicated characters within the confines of the Broadway format), in that you have to buy him *both* as this antisocial hermit that all of his friends are worried about who is phobic about human contact of any kind, *and* as someone who was once heedless and headlong, who is pulled to Mimi because he sees his younger self in her. It bothered me that they dropped the line that told us that April *killed herself,* rather than just dying of AIDS, because I think that really added something to the character, his need to save Mimi from herself, his own self-immolating tendencies, his suicide-of-omission when he can't leave the house. I think Adam didn't quite do justice to the character in terms of revealing his conflicts and making him sympathetic in his inherent weaknesses; given that you can't help but contrast him with Collins (even though the movie chopped the holy hell out of the graveyard scene, more on that later), it's important to find Roger at least *forgiveable* for not being able to be the man that Collins is. I think just on the strength of the movie, I wouldn't have been feeling very charitable toward Roger by that point. I realize I know Roger best from Adam's performance, so this seems weird, but I think some of the minor script changes were really not to his advantage, and I think some of his songs were just not as well done -- there was not as much nuance in the latter parts of "Out Tonight" or as much real commitment to "One Song Glory" as I think he had back in the day; I don't know if he's not aging well or if he was better-directed back then or if he's bored with the whole show and just doesn't give as much of a damn anymore or what.
ROSARIO DAWSON/MIMI:
First of all, before I praise, let me just say it was a little sad to have most everyone *but* Daphne Rubin-Vega there. I mean, clearly there was no choice, because while they're all *too old for Yentl,* it's even more critical that Mimi be (able to pass for) a teenager. I liked Rosario a lot; I always like her, she's excellent in everything. It's just for sentimental reasons that it made me slightly sad at moments, and also, oddly? Rosario plays Mimi a lot whiter than Daphne did, and I missed the way that Nuyorican thing came out in Daphne's voice much more clearly; Rosario looked fine (not, like, *fine* -- well, yes -- clearly, *yes* -- but I mean fine for the role), but when she wasn't specifically trying to do the accent, she sounded a lot more like a girl from the suburbs than I felt like Mimi should. Anyway. I thought she was great. She had no chemistry at all with Adam, but I'm willing to blame him for that. Her addiction sequences in "Without You" were brilliantly done, she really does move like a dancer, particularly all those times she slithers up the fire escape, which is awesome, and she's just-- I love Rosario. Who's a rock star? Also, I *fucking loved* her hair. I mean, I know that sounds shallow, but it's almost kind of not, the depth and purity of the love I had for Mimi's hair. It was a hair *epiphany* for me, OMG -- do you ever have that? Where someone's got hair and you're all bedazzled by it and convinced that it is the pinnacle of human achievement in beauty and fabulousness? No? Just me, then? 'Kay.
JESSE MARTIN/COLLINS:
I mean, what do you even say? Jesse was my *rock* going into this movie, because I trust him completely as an actor, and my love for his Collins is unconditional and boundless and all of that. And yet, somehow, he managed to be *better than I expected.* There's something about a man who can stand in the back of a frame and deliver the line "Honey, what are you doing?" in a way that makes it *the best goddamn line of the movie* that -- you just have to step back in awe. Jesse, we truly are NOT worthy. The reason L&O is the almost-perfect vehicle for Jesse is that for the actors, it's entirely about getting in your reaction shots and your nuances of expression and your quick, sharp line readings, rather than about getting to do anything very interesting ("Did you get a look at the license plate?" is not inherently a good line the first time, let alone the eighty-fifth). He's great at it, because he's a talent without parallel when it comes to that kind of thing. I could do a whole review of the movie just off of Jesse Martin's facial expressions. I won't, but I could. (Okay, just one! His little "No, no, I was completely a man!" look to his friends when Angel says she found him "moaning and groaning" was worth the $5.50 I spent in and of itself. There, now I'm done.) I say it's the almost-perfect vehicle, because he doesn't get to sing in L&O, and so it falls short of perfection. What can you say about Jesse's voice, man? *Damn.* Also, I don't know if it was him doing those flips in "Santa Fe" or not, but if it was, go, Jesse! Angel and Collins are just one of those couples for me that I love with all my heart and can be made happy just by thinking about, and now I have a whole new layer of happy added from the delightfulness of watching Jesse's Collins watch Angel; he just conveys so much tenderness and admiration and boyish OMG-I'm-so-lucky! whenever he's looking at Angel, I'm amazed I didn't stroke out from squee in the theater. And seriously, if you don't tear up at least a little in the "Cover You" reprise, you are dead inside.
WILSON JERMAINE HEREDIA/ANGEL:
Pretty much more of the above. I often feel like I shouldn't adore Angel so much, because it's become kind of a stereotype, hasn't it? The gentle, sweet-natured queer/trans character who is utterly above reproach, and suffers but is universally loved and undeserving of all that pain, so we can all sit there and go, "Yeah, man, AIDS/homophobia/mean people TOTALLY DO suck!" And yet, I am easily manipulated, I suppose, because it totally works on me. I do love Angel. I love everything about Angel, from her stretchy tights and her flippy little skirts to the Timberlakey way she drums on stationary objects whenever she's sitting still to the way she gets her man to hold her pink purse for her before she clubs off the padlock on the door. There's nothing I don't love about Angel, and I have zero complaints about Wilson (did anyone else, back in the early 90s, used to get him confused with Wilson Cruz a lot?) I feel like I should say more, to truly impress upon you how happy I was with this aspect of the movie, but I've got nothing special, really, so it would just be a few more lines of "OMG, I love Angel! OMG, Wilson was awesome!" over and over again, and I'll spare you.
IDINA MENZEL/MAUREEN:
This was actually the surprise of the movie for me, how much I *adored* Maureen. She's never been my favorite character from the show, and I have no complaints about Idina, but no investment in her, either, and she was one of the people I was looking askance at because of her age. And yet, I loved her almost as much as I loved Jesse, and for many of the same reasons. I can't believe how expressive she is, and how genuine -- all those little Maureen quirks, which can come off as affected, completely registered with me as coming from this very good-hearted, warm, slightly daffy but intensely real free spirit. I found her so likeable that it almost undercut the "Maureen is the Devil in a Red Dress" vibe the show works -- that whole element of trust-her/don't-trust-her, love-her-but-know-it's-going-to-blow-up-i
TRACIE THOMS/JOANNE:
I'm still just not sure I can wrap my head around skinny!Joanne; there's dissonance there that I'm having trouble shaking. You can't fault her voice, though; man, can she sing. I was impressed with her ability, as a relatively unseasoned actor, to hold her own against someone like Idina Menzel, who has that hugeness of presence and voice and personality that most women who've had substantial Broadway careers necessarily have. I'd heard complaints that they femmed Joanne up, and they did, but in all honesty I felt that they butched Maureen up, too, so that they both become more ambiguous characters in a way I felt added to their dynamic rather than subtracted from it. Maureen wasn't just the Femme Fatale, she was this kind of punky, kick-your-ass-and-make-you-like-it downtown girl, and Joanne doesn't just freak Mark out by being a better man than him, she freaks him out by being a better man than him and turning him on at the same time. Other than my above issue which is that I thought the movie gave Joanne less grounds to call Maureen on the carpet than the show did, so that at the places where you were like "Yeah! Tell her!" in the soundtrack, you're more inclined to be "Aw, give her a break!" in the movie, I have to say I found myself more charmed by the Maureen/Joanne in this version than I was before, not less. They have good chemistry. Though Joanne should still be four inches taller and eighty pounds heavier.
ANTHONY RUPP/MARK:
I thought his performance was good, especially given that he had to subtext his way through Mark's entire character arc, which got the boot from the movie script. None of that issue of being the one to live long enough to watch all his friends die and of using the distance of the camera to protect himself from it was there, but I felt like you could see it several times in Anthony's acting, particularly in the LifeSupport scenes. Watching him join in on the "Will someone care?" round was lovely, because there's this sense of, yes, he's apart from this, from what the rest of them are going through, but at the same time his issues are the same: he's living with AIDS, too, he's scared, too, he's got the same concerns about being strong enough to handle it and about loneliness and all that. I thought that was good. I just wondered if it would come across that strongly to someone who's only seen the movie, where they never expressly bring that up. I also really adored him in those scenes where his camera would shut off and you'd see this moment of agonized indecision: interrupt them? keep shooting? stop and sit down? be here, or film it? He did a lot in those little moments, which is all to his credit. Like I said, I hope the meaning of it stands when you have a script that doesn't make any mention of Mark's own internal conflicts.
Okay, now everything else.
It was slightly disconcerting, at first, to have all those recitatives translated into straight dialogue, but ultimately I think it was a good choice, and I enjoyed listening for what they kept and what they played with.
Even more disconcerting was the fuckery with the timeline, which totally tied my brain in knots. In the show, the entire first act takes place in one day, Christmas Eve, but in the movie, it apparently takes two days, with Mimi coming back for "Out Tonight" on the day after "Candle," with a second LifeSupport meeting in between. I couldn't quite puzzle that out in my head. Also, I really didn't like the fact that Mimi sings almost all of "Out Tonight" *to herself,* which seemed to me to defeat the purpose of it being her seduction song, that sort of devil on Roger's shoulder. I didn't like it that the first part is done in the context of her stage show, which introduces the possibility that this is Mimi's stage persona rather than her entire approach to life (I know people probably got it anyway, but it bothered me), and I realize there's something inherently insane about getting heated up about realism in a musical, but as she's walking down the alley doing that whole segment of the song about "you can get in, too, if you get in with me" etc., I couldn't stop going, girl, who the hell are you talking to? An aria is fine, I love me a good aria, but in the second person, it's just weird. Also, I think that Roger witnessing the slippage of her bravado in the "feels too damn much like home" bridge is crucial to their relationship: he sympathizes with her wildness *and* with her brokenness, he admires her *and* he wants to fix her.
The first act was pretty much great for me. "Santa Fe" has always been one of my favorite songs, and this version was unbelievably great; so was "La Vie Boheme." In the second act, they started tinkering a lot more, and I often found myself wondering what on earth they were thinking.
The Maureen/Joanne relationship detoured strangely; whereas in the show they're constantly on and off through the whole second act, in the movie they have this one climactic fight and then apparently never reunite -- unless they do. Because they are walking through the park together at the end, and yet the last we saw of them was their fight at the cemetery, so we're sort of left to guess for ourselves what their status is, and that bugged me. I'm willing to have the ambiguity at the end, where you see them reconnecting but you don't know where it'll go, but I dislike not knowing if they walked *into* the scene reconciled or not. Also, I just liked the volatility of their relationship, which you lose with only the one breakup. Also, you lose Maureen begging to be taken back, which rocks.
The Roger/Mimi relationship seemed even more oddly rewritten. In the show, there's this ongoing friction over Benny, which I think the movie really downplays -- since Benny *doesn't* claim to have gotten it on with Roger's girlfriend, it seems slightly more mean-spirited of Roger to turn that into an issue, and maybe they were trying to downplay it for that very reason. "Without You" seems to imply that her heroin use is much more the issue than jealousy, which is actually a shift that I'm happy with; that *would* be a huge issue for someone who is himself a recovering addict, let alone someone who has cause to be *immediately* concerned with her health, rather than in just a general "morphine is bad for you" kind of way (does that make anyone want to see Crow: The Musical? No? Me either, then).
They blew it with me by cutting "Contact." They blew it with me A LOT. First, because it's just a great song. Second, because it's, gah, hot like fire, and in a show that's all about rebellious decadence, doesn't it seem like someone should be getting laid? The music itself is hot, just being reminded that these people like each other like THAT is hot, and on stage it's done in silhouette behind these white curtains, and it's just, Jesus, totally fucking *hot.* But the third and most important reason, is that it's Angel's *moment.* Yes, you have all that staging in "Without You" that contrasts the Roger/Mimi relationship falling apart for reasons that could be prevented with the Collins/Angel relationship falling apart for reasons totally beyond their control -- but then, in the show, *Angel recuperates.* Angel's real exit, the real last time we see him, is this short but utterly glorious moment of ecstatic love and sexuality and joy when he does his "take me, I love you" thing, and that should be how Angel goes out. Yes, having him waste away is full of operatic pathos and whatnot, but hell, genre convention requires singing before you die, and more importantly, it's a million times better to have *that* be Angel's legacy, in a sense, that ability to dance and more importantly to give himself over and trust. And it's kind of schmoopy and melodramatic to cut from Angel's deathbed to his funeral, but holy God, the cut from that song to Collins's "it's over" and then into the music for the funeral? It's fucking amazing. It's brilliant, and there's no justification on earth for erasing it entirely from the movie.
So now I'm grumpy, and they go on to butcher that whole last movement in the graveyard. They take out critical information: like, oh, say, *Mimi's dying,* so that Roger running away makes no particular sense except for petulance over getting dumped, and then they ditch the "goodbye, love / glory" piece that's not only incandescently beautiful, but that really is there to highlight the fact that when Roger and Mimi talk about their relationship *they know* that what they're talking about is when and how they'll die. They get rid of the fight between Roger and Mark, and with it the climax of Mark's whole character arc, along with the compare-and-contrast with Mark and Roger's struggles with authenticity and courage. Joanne's solidarity with Mimi, btw, also doesn't make much sense if you don't realize she's been over the same ground with Maureen again and again, so see above on the weirdness of their arc. Also, while the music on the "Cover You" reprise was above reproach, it kept bugging me that there were like twelve people in the church. Angel knew everybody and everybody loved Angel: on stage there's a reason you can't pack in three hundred extras for one scene, but that's why you film movies! They totally blew an opportunity to have a really touching scene, with all these people, bums and suits and drag queens and Hispanic grandmas in headscarves, every kind of person, file grievingly past Angel's coffin. Because that's how it would really happen, he would really have affected all kinds of people that way.
Anyway. From there on it's not so bad, even though I was still grumpy. I liked the looking-for-Mimi stuff, although I did miss the answering-machine montage. Maureen and Joanne find her in the park -- were they still searching? out for a walk together? wtf? -- and I don't think Mimi's delirium was as good in prose; most of the movie doesn't suffer from losing the recitatives, but that bit I think does. And then she fades out, and Roger sings that slack-ass song that even Jonathan Larson didn't like, and dude, seriously. Replace that fucking song; it's not good. This was your chance! Jonathan would forgive you, I know it! Also, then you'd have an original song to be eligible for an Oscar. Use your heads! Also, did I mention? The song's not good, and I didn't like Roger anyway by that point, so it could have been more dramatic, as far as I was concerned.
Nevertheless, the very very end was nice, with all of them hanging onto each other while they watched their One Big Year flicker by on Mark's screen, and you really can't ruin that ending musically. It's amazing how something so simple as a repeating pattern of two critical lines from earlier songs can serve as such an amazing, uplifting finale; I think a lot of the sheer genius of the show for me is in that finale, with the "No day but today" and the "I die without you" escalating upward and upward, over and over, almost religiously. It sums up what the show is about for me, which isn't really the struggles of pretentious urban artistes worried about their artistic credibility, but just this idea that there are a million ways to sell out, and all of them boil down to turning away from the things and people you love, not holding onto them as fiercely and as long as you can. Everybody in the movie does well; it surely helps that the majority of them go so far back with each other, but even if it's just their mad acting skillz, they really end it with this sense that they've all come home and that they value each other much more now than they ever did and won't blow it with each other again, however hard it gets. I felt less grumpy.
And that's all I can think of right now. Maybe I can come up with another dozen or two k after I see it a second time *g*
I could do a post about Thanksgiving (so, so much vodka) or about last week's VMars (how can Duncan be so screwed up and yet so boring at the same time? mamma's gonna need some things from RadioShack, bwah! Logan/Eli -- nobody can try to have you killed like your ex-boyfriend, know what I mean?) or the way that my love of X-Files has finally paid off for me by making me look both smart and interesting in front of my 3000 professor (thanks, Darrin Morgan!) -- but no, there is no time for that. This post will be all about Rent.
First of all, you know, I liked it. I say this because, as you probably all know, most of the time being a geek for something means you complain about it A LOT, and I plan to complain a lot. I love Rent so very, very much, that pretty much two things were guaranteed to happen for me in the movie: A) I was going to be blissed out by it, and 2) I was going to pick it to fucking death.
I think, first, that I'll tackle the movie character-by-character, and then think about some of the structural changes and whatnot.
ADAM PASCAL/ROGER:
I just want to get this out of the way up front; this was the only performance I wasn't particularly chuffed by. He still has a really strong voice, but somehow, even after all those years (because of all those years?), he didn't seem to have a lot to bring *to* Roger, acting-wise. Compared to a lot of the others, he seemed, weirdly, to be both over-indulgent as a singer and under-expressive as an actor, and I was really just not that impressed. Roger is a critical and sort of complicated character (inasmuch as you can do complicated characters within the confines of the Broadway format), in that you have to buy him *both* as this antisocial hermit that all of his friends are worried about who is phobic about human contact of any kind, *and* as someone who was once heedless and headlong, who is pulled to Mimi because he sees his younger self in her. It bothered me that they dropped the line that told us that April *killed herself,* rather than just dying of AIDS, because I think that really added something to the character, his need to save Mimi from herself, his own self-immolating tendencies, his suicide-of-omission when he can't leave the house. I think Adam didn't quite do justice to the character in terms of revealing his conflicts and making him sympathetic in his inherent weaknesses; given that you can't help but contrast him with Collins (even though the movie chopped the holy hell out of the graveyard scene, more on that later), it's important to find Roger at least *forgiveable* for not being able to be the man that Collins is. I think just on the strength of the movie, I wouldn't have been feeling very charitable toward Roger by that point. I realize I know Roger best from Adam's performance, so this seems weird, but I think some of the minor script changes were really not to his advantage, and I think some of his songs were just not as well done -- there was not as much nuance in the latter parts of "Out Tonight" or as much real commitment to "One Song Glory" as I think he had back in the day; I don't know if he's not aging well or if he was better-directed back then or if he's bored with the whole show and just doesn't give as much of a damn anymore or what.
ROSARIO DAWSON/MIMI:
First of all, before I praise, let me just say it was a little sad to have most everyone *but* Daphne Rubin-Vega there. I mean, clearly there was no choice, because while they're all *too old for Yentl,* it's even more critical that Mimi be (able to pass for) a teenager. I liked Rosario a lot; I always like her, she's excellent in everything. It's just for sentimental reasons that it made me slightly sad at moments, and also, oddly? Rosario plays Mimi a lot whiter than Daphne did, and I missed the way that Nuyorican thing came out in Daphne's voice much more clearly; Rosario looked fine (not, like, *fine* -- well, yes -- clearly, *yes* -- but I mean fine for the role), but when she wasn't specifically trying to do the accent, she sounded a lot more like a girl from the suburbs than I felt like Mimi should. Anyway. I thought she was great. She had no chemistry at all with Adam, but I'm willing to blame him for that. Her addiction sequences in "Without You" were brilliantly done, she really does move like a dancer, particularly all those times she slithers up the fire escape, which is awesome, and she's just-- I love Rosario. Who's a rock star? Also, I *fucking loved* her hair. I mean, I know that sounds shallow, but it's almost kind of not, the depth and purity of the love I had for Mimi's hair. It was a hair *epiphany* for me, OMG -- do you ever have that? Where someone's got hair and you're all bedazzled by it and convinced that it is the pinnacle of human achievement in beauty and fabulousness? No? Just me, then? 'Kay.
JESSE MARTIN/COLLINS:
I mean, what do you even say? Jesse was my *rock* going into this movie, because I trust him completely as an actor, and my love for his Collins is unconditional and boundless and all of that. And yet, somehow, he managed to be *better than I expected.* There's something about a man who can stand in the back of a frame and deliver the line "Honey, what are you doing?" in a way that makes it *the best goddamn line of the movie* that -- you just have to step back in awe. Jesse, we truly are NOT worthy. The reason L&O is the almost-perfect vehicle for Jesse is that for the actors, it's entirely about getting in your reaction shots and your nuances of expression and your quick, sharp line readings, rather than about getting to do anything very interesting ("Did you get a look at the license plate?" is not inherently a good line the first time, let alone the eighty-fifth). He's great at it, because he's a talent without parallel when it comes to that kind of thing. I could do a whole review of the movie just off of Jesse Martin's facial expressions. I won't, but I could. (Okay, just one! His little "No, no, I was completely a man!" look to his friends when Angel says she found him "moaning and groaning" was worth the $5.50 I spent in and of itself. There, now I'm done.) I say it's the almost-perfect vehicle, because he doesn't get to sing in L&O, and so it falls short of perfection. What can you say about Jesse's voice, man? *Damn.* Also, I don't know if it was him doing those flips in "Santa Fe" or not, but if it was, go, Jesse! Angel and Collins are just one of those couples for me that I love with all my heart and can be made happy just by thinking about, and now I have a whole new layer of happy added from the delightfulness of watching Jesse's Collins watch Angel; he just conveys so much tenderness and admiration and boyish OMG-I'm-so-lucky! whenever he's looking at Angel, I'm amazed I didn't stroke out from squee in the theater. And seriously, if you don't tear up at least a little in the "Cover You" reprise, you are dead inside.
WILSON JERMAINE HEREDIA/ANGEL:
Pretty much more of the above. I often feel like I shouldn't adore Angel so much, because it's become kind of a stereotype, hasn't it? The gentle, sweet-natured queer/trans character who is utterly above reproach, and suffers but is universally loved and undeserving of all that pain, so we can all sit there and go, "Yeah, man, AIDS/homophobia/mean people TOTALLY DO suck!" And yet, I am easily manipulated, I suppose, because it totally works on me. I do love Angel. I love everything about Angel, from her stretchy tights and her flippy little skirts to the Timberlakey way she drums on stationary objects whenever she's sitting still to the way she gets her man to hold her pink purse for her before she clubs off the padlock on the door. There's nothing I don't love about Angel, and I have zero complaints about Wilson (did anyone else, back in the early 90s, used to get him confused with Wilson Cruz a lot?) I feel like I should say more, to truly impress upon you how happy I was with this aspect of the movie, but I've got nothing special, really, so it would just be a few more lines of "OMG, I love Angel! OMG, Wilson was awesome!" over and over again, and I'll spare you.
IDINA MENZEL/MAUREEN:
This was actually the surprise of the movie for me, how much I *adored* Maureen. She's never been my favorite character from the show, and I have no complaints about Idina, but no investment in her, either, and she was one of the people I was looking askance at because of her age. And yet, I loved her almost as much as I loved Jesse, and for many of the same reasons. I can't believe how expressive she is, and how genuine -- all those little Maureen quirks, which can come off as affected, completely registered with me as coming from this very good-hearted, warm, slightly daffy but intensely real free spirit. I found her so likeable that it almost undercut the "Maureen is the Devil in a Red Dress" vibe the show works -- that whole element of trust-her/don't-trust-her, love-her-but-know-it's-going-to-blow-up-i
TRACIE THOMS/JOANNE:
I'm still just not sure I can wrap my head around skinny!Joanne; there's dissonance there that I'm having trouble shaking. You can't fault her voice, though; man, can she sing. I was impressed with her ability, as a relatively unseasoned actor, to hold her own against someone like Idina Menzel, who has that hugeness of presence and voice and personality that most women who've had substantial Broadway careers necessarily have. I'd heard complaints that they femmed Joanne up, and they did, but in all honesty I felt that they butched Maureen up, too, so that they both become more ambiguous characters in a way I felt added to their dynamic rather than subtracted from it. Maureen wasn't just the Femme Fatale, she was this kind of punky, kick-your-ass-and-make-you-like-it downtown girl, and Joanne doesn't just freak Mark out by being a better man than him, she freaks him out by being a better man than him and turning him on at the same time. Other than my above issue which is that I thought the movie gave Joanne less grounds to call Maureen on the carpet than the show did, so that at the places where you were like "Yeah! Tell her!" in the soundtrack, you're more inclined to be "Aw, give her a break!" in the movie, I have to say I found myself more charmed by the Maureen/Joanne in this version than I was before, not less. They have good chemistry. Though Joanne should still be four inches taller and eighty pounds heavier.
ANTHONY RUPP/MARK:
I thought his performance was good, especially given that he had to subtext his way through Mark's entire character arc, which got the boot from the movie script. None of that issue of being the one to live long enough to watch all his friends die and of using the distance of the camera to protect himself from it was there, but I felt like you could see it several times in Anthony's acting, particularly in the LifeSupport scenes. Watching him join in on the "Will someone care?" round was lovely, because there's this sense of, yes, he's apart from this, from what the rest of them are going through, but at the same time his issues are the same: he's living with AIDS, too, he's scared, too, he's got the same concerns about being strong enough to handle it and about loneliness and all that. I thought that was good. I just wondered if it would come across that strongly to someone who's only seen the movie, where they never expressly bring that up. I also really adored him in those scenes where his camera would shut off and you'd see this moment of agonized indecision: interrupt them? keep shooting? stop and sit down? be here, or film it? He did a lot in those little moments, which is all to his credit. Like I said, I hope the meaning of it stands when you have a script that doesn't make any mention of Mark's own internal conflicts.
Okay, now everything else.
It was slightly disconcerting, at first, to have all those recitatives translated into straight dialogue, but ultimately I think it was a good choice, and I enjoyed listening for what they kept and what they played with.
Even more disconcerting was the fuckery with the timeline, which totally tied my brain in knots. In the show, the entire first act takes place in one day, Christmas Eve, but in the movie, it apparently takes two days, with Mimi coming back for "Out Tonight" on the day after "Candle," with a second LifeSupport meeting in between. I couldn't quite puzzle that out in my head. Also, I really didn't like the fact that Mimi sings almost all of "Out Tonight" *to herself,* which seemed to me to defeat the purpose of it being her seduction song, that sort of devil on Roger's shoulder. I didn't like it that the first part is done in the context of her stage show, which introduces the possibility that this is Mimi's stage persona rather than her entire approach to life (I know people probably got it anyway, but it bothered me), and I realize there's something inherently insane about getting heated up about realism in a musical, but as she's walking down the alley doing that whole segment of the song about "you can get in, too, if you get in with me" etc., I couldn't stop going, girl, who the hell are you talking to? An aria is fine, I love me a good aria, but in the second person, it's just weird. Also, I think that Roger witnessing the slippage of her bravado in the "feels too damn much like home" bridge is crucial to their relationship: he sympathizes with her wildness *and* with her brokenness, he admires her *and* he wants to fix her.
The first act was pretty much great for me. "Santa Fe" has always been one of my favorite songs, and this version was unbelievably great; so was "La Vie Boheme." In the second act, they started tinkering a lot more, and I often found myself wondering what on earth they were thinking.
The Maureen/Joanne relationship detoured strangely; whereas in the show they're constantly on and off through the whole second act, in the movie they have this one climactic fight and then apparently never reunite -- unless they do. Because they are walking through the park together at the end, and yet the last we saw of them was their fight at the cemetery, so we're sort of left to guess for ourselves what their status is, and that bugged me. I'm willing to have the ambiguity at the end, where you see them reconnecting but you don't know where it'll go, but I dislike not knowing if they walked *into* the scene reconciled or not. Also, I just liked the volatility of their relationship, which you lose with only the one breakup. Also, you lose Maureen begging to be taken back, which rocks.
The Roger/Mimi relationship seemed even more oddly rewritten. In the show, there's this ongoing friction over Benny, which I think the movie really downplays -- since Benny *doesn't* claim to have gotten it on with Roger's girlfriend, it seems slightly more mean-spirited of Roger to turn that into an issue, and maybe they were trying to downplay it for that very reason. "Without You" seems to imply that her heroin use is much more the issue than jealousy, which is actually a shift that I'm happy with; that *would* be a huge issue for someone who is himself a recovering addict, let alone someone who has cause to be *immediately* concerned with her health, rather than in just a general "morphine is bad for you" kind of way (does that make anyone want to see Crow: The Musical? No? Me either, then).
They blew it with me by cutting "Contact." They blew it with me A LOT. First, because it's just a great song. Second, because it's, gah, hot like fire, and in a show that's all about rebellious decadence, doesn't it seem like someone should be getting laid? The music itself is hot, just being reminded that these people like each other like THAT is hot, and on stage it's done in silhouette behind these white curtains, and it's just, Jesus, totally fucking *hot.* But the third and most important reason, is that it's Angel's *moment.* Yes, you have all that staging in "Without You" that contrasts the Roger/Mimi relationship falling apart for reasons that could be prevented with the Collins/Angel relationship falling apart for reasons totally beyond their control -- but then, in the show, *Angel recuperates.* Angel's real exit, the real last time we see him, is this short but utterly glorious moment of ecstatic love and sexuality and joy when he does his "take me, I love you" thing, and that should be how Angel goes out. Yes, having him waste away is full of operatic pathos and whatnot, but hell, genre convention requires singing before you die, and more importantly, it's a million times better to have *that* be Angel's legacy, in a sense, that ability to dance and more importantly to give himself over and trust. And it's kind of schmoopy and melodramatic to cut from Angel's deathbed to his funeral, but holy God, the cut from that song to Collins's "it's over" and then into the music for the funeral? It's fucking amazing. It's brilliant, and there's no justification on earth for erasing it entirely from the movie.
So now I'm grumpy, and they go on to butcher that whole last movement in the graveyard. They take out critical information: like, oh, say, *Mimi's dying,* so that Roger running away makes no particular sense except for petulance over getting dumped, and then they ditch the "goodbye, love / glory" piece that's not only incandescently beautiful, but that really is there to highlight the fact that when Roger and Mimi talk about their relationship *they know* that what they're talking about is when and how they'll die. They get rid of the fight between Roger and Mark, and with it the climax of Mark's whole character arc, along with the compare-and-contrast with Mark and Roger's struggles with authenticity and courage. Joanne's solidarity with Mimi, btw, also doesn't make much sense if you don't realize she's been over the same ground with Maureen again and again, so see above on the weirdness of their arc. Also, while the music on the "Cover You" reprise was above reproach, it kept bugging me that there were like twelve people in the church. Angel knew everybody and everybody loved Angel: on stage there's a reason you can't pack in three hundred extras for one scene, but that's why you film movies! They totally blew an opportunity to have a really touching scene, with all these people, bums and suits and drag queens and Hispanic grandmas in headscarves, every kind of person, file grievingly past Angel's coffin. Because that's how it would really happen, he would really have affected all kinds of people that way.
Anyway. From there on it's not so bad, even though I was still grumpy. I liked the looking-for-Mimi stuff, although I did miss the answering-machine montage. Maureen and Joanne find her in the park -- were they still searching? out for a walk together? wtf? -- and I don't think Mimi's delirium was as good in prose; most of the movie doesn't suffer from losing the recitatives, but that bit I think does. And then she fades out, and Roger sings that slack-ass song that even Jonathan Larson didn't like, and dude, seriously. Replace that fucking song; it's not good. This was your chance! Jonathan would forgive you, I know it! Also, then you'd have an original song to be eligible for an Oscar. Use your heads! Also, did I mention? The song's not good, and I didn't like Roger anyway by that point, so it could have been more dramatic, as far as I was concerned.
Nevertheless, the very very end was nice, with all of them hanging onto each other while they watched their One Big Year flicker by on Mark's screen, and you really can't ruin that ending musically. It's amazing how something so simple as a repeating pattern of two critical lines from earlier songs can serve as such an amazing, uplifting finale; I think a lot of the sheer genius of the show for me is in that finale, with the "No day but today" and the "I die without you" escalating upward and upward, over and over, almost religiously. It sums up what the show is about for me, which isn't really the struggles of pretentious urban artistes worried about their artistic credibility, but just this idea that there are a million ways to sell out, and all of them boil down to turning away from the things and people you love, not holding onto them as fiercely and as long as you can. Everybody in the movie does well; it surely helps that the majority of them go so far back with each other, but even if it's just their mad acting skillz, they really end it with this sense that they've all come home and that they value each other much more now than they ever did and won't blow it with each other again, however hard it gets. I felt less grumpy.
And that's all I can think of right now. Maybe I can come up with another dozen or two k after I see it a second time *g*
