Clint Eastwood (2014)
An hour or so into Jersey Boys, there’s a short scene that takes place at Coney Island. In the foreground two men are talking; in the background there’s water. The sight of that water is refreshing simply because it’s undoubtedly the real thing. This composition is a reversal of old Hollywood films in which the actors share the screen with an obviously fake backdrop. Otherwise, most of the people and places in Clint Eastwood’s movie are in complete balance: they’re equally flat and lifeless. There’s hardly a single setting that has the appearance or feel of a place someone had set foot in before it was a film set – whether it’s a club in which Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are performing or a hotel room or a diner or the record producer Bob Crewe’s swanky apartment or a modest family home. The performers often stand frozen, as if waiting to be told what to do next. The action starts in 1951 and runs through to at least 1980, with a 1990 epilogue that sees the Four Seasons inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The viewer is expected to keep up with the chronology by watching the outfits and hairdos change but Jersey Boys has neither visual texture nor any sort of period vitality. This isn’t because Eastwood has decided to stylise the material in deference to its stage origins: the look of the film seems meant to be realistic but is merely toneless. The predominating colours in the DoP Tom Stern’s uninteresting palette are browns and beiges. John Lloyd Young is a truly ageless Frankie Valli: the decades pass but his creamy, flawlessly blank complexion remains the same – until, that is, the Hall of Fame reunion when the make-up people suddenly overcompensate and Frankie, along with the others, is turned into an old man.
This screen version of the award-winning, long-running jukebox stage musical has had mixed notices; that’s often a euphemism for ‘bad’ but, judging from Rotten Tomatoes (55% fresh at present) and the reviews by Mark Kermode and Anthony Lane, ‘mixed’ is the right word here. This is testament to the enduring esteem in which Clint Eastwood is held because this film is bad – and, not for the first time with this director, bad in fundamental ways. I didn’t understand why pictures such as Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Changeling were so lauded but these did feature some outstanding performers: even if the likes of Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie weren’t doing anything like their best work, you knew you were watching first-rate film actors. Except for Christopher Walken, in a supporting role, that’s not the case in Jersey Boys. The main quartet includes three actors who have played the same character on stage; John Lloyd Young won a Tony in the original Broadway production; but neither he nor Michael Lomenda (Nick Massi) nor, to a lesser extent, Erich Bergen (Bob Gaudio) is comfortable on screen. This isn’t a case of the performances looking as if they were fully worked out in the theatre and have become lifeless through frequent repetition; on the contrary, the actors don’t seem yet to have found their characters. Their playing is stiff, unnuanced and not theatrically vigorous enough even to be described as stagy: Young is particularly and remarkably uncharismatic. The prevailing lack of energy means that the relatively histrionic playing – from Renee Marino as Frankie’s fast-talking, hard-drinking wife Mary or Vincent Piazza as the fourth member of the Seasons, the vicious, volatile Tommy DeVito – looks like bad overacting. Piazza, whose TV credits include The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, has more life than the other Jersey boys but he comes across as a crude cartoon of a dodgy sub-hood. Because he’s such an effortless screen performer, it’s a relief to watch Walken, as the mobster Gyp DeCarlo, who ‘helps out’ Frankie Valli and his colleagues. It’s also a problem, however, because Walken exposes the others’ limitations so utterly. He belongs to a different species and in a different movie.
Marshall Brickman (who co-wrote Annie Hall) and Rick Elice did the book for the stage musical and their names are on the screenplay too. It’s a shambles. Each of the Four Seasons has bits of to-camera narration, explaining their version of what happened, a device carried over from the theatre, where it was intended to have a ‘Rashomon effect’ (!) It’s used so sporadically and perfunctorily in the film that you never get a sense of competing versions. In the last half hour there are clumsy attempts to resolve subplots that hardly got started in the first place, concerning Frankie Valli’s tragic daughter Francine and a journalist with whom he has what suddenly appears to have been a very long-running affair. I didn’t expect the famous songs to be staged with much flair but I did expect them to be Clint Eastwood-proof and they’re not. I found myself looking away from the screen while listening to ‘Sherry’ and ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’: perhaps John Lloyd Young is accurately mimicking Frankie Valli’s performing mannerisms but the effect is forced, almost painful. (It’s just about worth sitting out the 134 minutes in order to hear the original recordings over the closing titles.) Previewing the film in the New Yorker earlier this month, Richard Brody highlighted as a distinctive feature of Jersey Boys (on the basis of the trailer!) ‘the conflict between the artists’ private lives and their public image’. It’s not that easy to think of a biopic that hasn’t used that tension as its dramatic motor. The criminal world of New Jersey (Gyp DeCarlo was part of the Genovese Mafia family) out of which the Four Seasons supplies what may be a distinctive context for a movie musical but, in the event, it counts for nothing. It has no more dynamism or reality than anything else in a film that’s dead on the screen.
26 June 2014
