Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 05, 2014 5:17 pm 
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Music makers

Two movies about songwriting are playing in American cinemas, Jersey Boys and Begin Again. Their styles and conceptions are a contrast and one is a lot more successful than the other. Jersey Boys is watchable and entertaining enough but overall a disappointment, and too long. Though Jersey Boys is about real hits and Begin Again is fantasy songwriting that may get lost in cyberspace, it's Begin Again that works. Jersey Boys is an adaptation of the immensely popular jukebox musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons that hit Broadway in 2005 and is still playing there and in productions all over the world. Sad to say, even with Clint Eastwood at the helm, its screen version is ordinary and lackluster to the point of almost constant déjà vu. The onstage Jersey Boys -- this is what "jukebox musical" means -- is one long string of catchy, nostalgic, hook-dominated Sixties hits. The audience is regaled with lively (and live) front-and-center stage performances of the likes of "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Sherry (baby)," " Oh, What A Night," "My Eyes Adored You," "Stay," "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", "Working My Way Back to You" and "Rag Doll." The story is delivered in the form of strings of patter between the hits and their energetic performances. It's a musical, absolutely, and incidentally, in between, a portrait of the people who made the songs. The songs are the stage Jersey Boys's alpha and omega.

The movie can't quite seem to do it like that. It pumps up the background material with fully dramatized scenes with lots of different elaborate (though not necessarily beautiful) locations. Naturally, there are a lot of shiny Sixties cars cruising around, and a lot of different clubs and cafes and music halls. It's not till nearly an hour into the movie that "Sherry Baby" rings out and the hits begin to roll. At that point you may begin to relax, hoping to be relieved of the petty squabbles and Jersey sub-mafioso criminality and began to sit back and enjoy the music. But that pleasure is complicated by all the elaborate "dramatizing" of events.

Sets include, toward the end of the movie, the handsome mansion of Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken) when the group is about to disintegrate due to the huge debts racked up by the group's most disreputable and destructive member, Tony DeVito (Vincent Piazza). They came from semi-gangster Jersey backgrounds, but only Tony stuck in the clutches of crooked loan sharks. Part of the musical's success and longevity lies in the fact that the main roles of the group are, frankly, not so hard to replace. You just need a supple falsetto to play Frankie Valli (here John Lloyd Young fills the bill); a cleancut, innocent-looking guy to play the songwriter Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen); Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda here) must be a tall guy who delivers the Sixties-style quartet's traditional booming bass moments. As the sleazy, dangerous DeVito, someone handsome and slick is called for (a need well filled by Piazza). Of course nobody could replace Christopher Walken, who, being a well-known song-and-dance man himself, shares ably in a dance finale staged in the street where the whole cast joins in.

But there are too few blatantly theatrical moments like that in the film, and it winds up feeling like a dozen other over-literal musical biopics with their ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, squabbles with spouses, stresses on the road, arguments and breakthroughs in the recording studio, and all the rest. The stage musical is not like this but much simpler, just a string of delightful and nostalgic songs economically set in brief skits that set the historical and personal contexts. The plot is the same, basically. But the Eastwood movie's elaborate "opening up" makes it all just seem familiar and corny. Casting everything in crudely nostalgic color faded to reddish almost-sepia does not help. It just makes you wonder when the flashback is going to be over. When it is, at the 1990 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, it's way too late.

John Carney's Begin Again has its good and bad points, but overall it works terrifically well. It's about songwriters too, but they're made up, and instead of spanning decades it covers maybe a week or two. Mark Ruffalo dominates as Dan, the burnt out, drunken recording producer who's just been fired by Saul (ably played by Mos Def), the manager of the recording company he himself started, because he won't move with the times. Dan gets drunk and goes to a club where he hears lonely British girl Greta (Keira Knightley, charming and relaxed), a sometime songwriter, who's just broken up with Dave (Adam Levine), her suddenly successful American singer-songwriter boyfriend. Dave's just gone to LA on his own after hitting it big and dumped her for a pretty girl at the record company. Greta's busker friend Steve (James Corden, Timms in The History Boys) has dragged her to an open-mike club and pushed her to sing a song she's written. And who should wander in but Dan, on a bender.

Greta's voice is wispy and her performance is flat, but in his inebriated state Dan, the producer, imagines a musical setting -- a cello plays itself, a piano's keys begin to twinkle unaided -- and that shows him this is, in the rough, a great song, the kind of authenticity he's been holding out for.

In a way Begin Again is, obviously, an elaborate American replay of Carney's surprise Dublin-set indie hit Once, about a couple of buskers, a man and woman, who become a couple only in order to compose and perform a couple of great songs. The fantasy is more elaborate here, and some might consider it pushed, the way with Steve's help and by recruiting lots of young aspiring musicians, Dan makes not just a demo for Saul but a whole album, recording Greta's songs all over New York City, in the Park, on top of buildings, by the water, in alleyways, in subway stations, recruiting pushy kids who won't shut up to add a chorus. It's a hoot. They have a great time. Thanks to vigorous staging and some smooth editing, it's alive and feels improvised. In between there's time for Greta's off-and-on relationship with the over-ambitious boyfriend Dave and for Dan's relationship with his oversexed teenage daughter Violet (the adorable Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit) to flower and his broken connection with his wife Miriam (Catherine Keener) to be restored.

This sounds too good to be true but Carney has the wisdom to leave Greta's situation ambiguous, perhaps as sad and lonely at the end as at the beginning. The only flaw is it might seem as though Mark Ruffalo is hogging this picture too much. He gets to play the kind of amiable loser he is the master of playing: the ne'er-do-well brother in Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me is the classic. This amiable loser is on steroids. In fact he's a winner with loser tendencies, who's staging a comeback, without even remotely selling out. Ruffalo is fun to watch swearing and fighting with everyone -- use of the F-word, seen as essential to American or New York life, has been upped exponentially from Once -- and going wild directing song after song in a rainbow of guerrilla settings. These sequences turn the usual studio song-recording scene on its head, with refreshing results.

Ruffalo doesn't overwhelm the picture because he's such fun to watch, and because he's balanced out with such surprising effectiveness by Knightley. As unruly and over-caffeinated as he is, she's correspondingly laid back and British. Forget Sabina Spielrein, Elizabeth Bennet, Anna Karenina, the Duchess of Devonshire. She's more convincing and at home here than she was in any of those highfalutin roles. Maybe Begin Again is a bit of a fake (Once was a fantasy too, just a humbler one), but it brings music-making and songwriting to life as Jersey Boys does not despite the latter's killer tunes. The tunes in Begin Again aren't as memorable; how could they be? But the movie performs the feat of making us see and judge song production, appreciating how a setting can bring to life a song in crude form, and how a simple song can be ruined by overproduction. We get to participate, not just listen. And the casting is superb. Nobody feels replaceable here.
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Jersey Boys, 134 mins., debuted 5 June 2014 at Sydney, showing at a few other festivals, then opening theatrically in many countries, 20 June in the UK and USA.
Begin Again, 104 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2013, played at other festivals, opening theatrically in the US 27 June 2014, UK 11 July.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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