Movie Pick

Rent Worth Paying

Rent (PG-13)

originally published November 30, 2005

Are fans of musical theater and lovers of the movie musical one and the same? If so, they had better act fast or all the gains made by Baz Luhrmann and, to a lesser extent, Rob Marshall, to update the narrative-through-song structure and visual spectacle for modern film audiences will soon be devoured by passé attempts by ham-fisted hacks like Joel Schumacher and Chris Columbus. Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge proved that the musical was not cinematically DOA, which the rotting stench wafting from any song-and-dance flick released between Grease and the new millennium led us all to believe. With Chicago, Marshall brought the musical back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage on which the genre had traditionally reigned (any Best Picture winner from the 1920s and 30s, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Oliver!, Cabaret). Then sprang the visual tedium of last year’s The Phantom of the Opera – boredom as a sing-along pop-up book – and the recently resuscitated musical was not only back on life support, but flatlining.

In 2005, musicals get one more lease on life, Rent. What better stage show to revive the movie musical (again) than the rock opera that helped usher Broadway into the 21st century? Taking place over the course of a late-’80s year in the modern Bohemia of New York City (Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winner was inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème), Rent was considered edgy in 1996 when it began its long Broadway run. Four main characters have AIDS, four are homosexual, and two are drug addicts. But all this reality is about as threatening as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Nazis, especially after Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a direct dark pipeline into the drugs, disease and death of 1980s New York. The film’s most overtly gay male – Angel – dresses so femininely that an unobservant viewer would be hard-pressed to realize he’s a man, man. (Homosexual relationships sell so much better in the Heartland when one of the dudes looks like a lady.) Add to the already sanitized film the not-exactly pedigreed Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter 1 & 2) as director, and this Rent doesn’t exactly seem worth paying.

It most definitely is, delivering a shock to the heart that should keep the movie musical breathing at least until The Producers is released. While Rent breaks absolutely no new visual ground, Larson’s songs, the moving lyrics and synthesized rock score, leave no questions concerning the longevity of his show. When Mark (Anthony Rapp), Roger (Adam Pascal), Collins (Jesse L. Martin, “Law & Order”), Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), Mimi (Rosario Dawson), Maureen (Idina Menzel), Joanne (Tracie Thoms) and Benny (Taye Diggs) sing, Rent soars. Who cares that the sets look left over from Fame when Mark and Joanne perform “Tango: Maureen?” Why worry about the stagnating mise-en-scène when Roger and Mimi duel on “Another Day?” I just wish Bob Fosse were around to do Larson’s powerful songs justice. Columbus’ belief that the more inert the scene the better is never more apparent than in this most visually underwhelming movie musical where music is the sole means of propulsion. Rarely opening the scenes up, he shoots everything claustrophobically tight, a bad call for a musical created to be a spectacle. During the off-key intervening interludes, the directorial shortcomings become heavy enough to knock a viewer senseless.

As with his biggest box office successes, Columbus earns his highest marks with casting. Retaining six of the original Broadway run’s stars, none of whom appear too old nine years later, excites “Rentheads” and ensures the chemistry indispensable in a tale of friends-turned-family. Granted, several of the actors – the expressive Rapp (a blonde Stephen Colbert) especially – don’t quite have the subtlety of movement and facial tone that is needed when transitioning from the wide-open stage to the confining screen. TV vets Diggs and Martin outshine their peers at this task. Vocally as well, Martin outclasses everyone besides Thoms in terms of power and virtuosity. Pity poor Pascal, whose Jon Bon Jovi locks too often distract from his exceptional work. (He gets no help from Columbus, who selects a New Mexico plateau right out of Jon Bon’s “Blaze of Glory” video for Roger’s emotionally climactic solo moment on “What You Own.”)

Occasionally veering over the double yellow line into excessive sentimentality, Rent doesn’t cheapen itself with a big dramatic death scene, a popular platform for AIDS polemics. The raw emoting of several tunes – the aforementioned “Another Day” and “Will I?” – warm the cockles of even my cold heart, lodging a lump in my throat not felt since the Clinton Administration. The fact that more people saw the film Rent in its first day of release than did in its entire year and a half run of sold-out shows (or so says Playbill), while disturbing, provides proof that America wants to listen to the music. And in Rent, the moving music pays the bills, narratively and emotionally. Too bad Columbus’ movie racks up some huge inartistic expenses. Were I one of those grading critics, Rent the musical would get an A+, while Rent the movie would warrant an average C at best. Fortunately, I would work like the SAT, averaging together the best scores to give Rent the movie musical a strong B.

Andrew Wheeler

Andrew Wheeler