The musical, like the western, is a once-popular genre now largely abandoned. But every now and then someone makes a really good musical, like Chicago, (or a really good western, like Unforgiven) and people start talking about a “revival” of the genre. Unfortunately, this typically leads to several crappy films that remind everyone of why the genre got abandoned in the first place.
Which brings us to Rent, a spectacularly crappy musical that, along with the equally spectacularly crappy Phantom of the Opera, should pretty much euthanize the movie musical for a decade or so.
Why did they let Chris Columbus direct this film? Why do they let Columbus direct anything? Why is the director of Bicentennial Man even allowed within 500 yards of a movie camera? Ever? Who knows. Columbus certainly managed to make a royal mess of this film. There’s not one iota of creativity here. Everything is shot in the dullest most obvious way possible so as not to over-stimulate, or even stimulate, the audience.
The whole thing is a drearily faithful adaptation of the Broadway original. Columbus even managed to get most of the original cast to reprise their roles for film. That sounds like a great idea, but it’s not for two reasons. First, the cast is all 10 years too old for their roles. Whatever energy the story has comes from the desperate struggles of a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make it in New York. With a bunch of thirty-somethings it just becomes pathetic and creepy. Second, the cast brings with them the ghosts of all those stage performances past, never really managing to make the roles come alive for film. It feels like an historical reenactment society: you can almost imagine what the original must have been like, and it was clearly nothing like the sorry sight unfolding before your eyes.
But even without unimaginative direction and stale casting choices, the film would still be saddled with the original musical itself. For that we have to blame the late Jonathan Larson.
In a way, Larson’s earnestly unsubtle work finds a perfect expression in Columbus’s earnestly unsubtle direction. But it’s a union of substance and style that only exacerbates the weaknesses of both. By trying to marry rock to the traditional Broadway score, Larson sadly achieved music that has neither the vibrancy and immediacy of contemporary rock nor the polish and wit of a good old-fashioned musical. The songs make blandly obvious statements about the characters in blandly obvious ways with thumping, predictable rhymes. The only decent number is “Seasons of Love”; the rest are utterly and instantly forgettable. By all accounts, Larson’s first and only musical (he died shortly after the premiere) was invigorating on stage, but then again so was Hair. Neither musical has aged well and neither translates well to the screen.
The story, such as it is, is supposed to be a modernization of La Boheme, but it never gets beyond the cuteness of its own conceit the way that, say, West Side Story does. We see characters die from AIDS instead of tuberculosis; that’s the level of “invention.” Rent is deadly serious about its live-for-today message, but earnest adolescent posturing is not art, and it’s certainly not entertainment.
Rent (2005)
Grade: D
