#1
Posted: 11/12/05 at 8:11am
My experience of the film was an interesting one. I was no doubt influenced by what I've read, heard and anticipated. But above all I was influenced by the 14 year old girl sitting next to me. Rather then a formal review -- from a craft standpoint - everything about the film has already been said -- what came out was an essay of sorts -- my rambling thoughts on the film and its legacy.
________________________________________________
In 1993, not long after moving to the East Village, I had my first true New York experience. It was about 9:00 AM on a Sunday morning at a sidewalk café in Alphabet City. A fleshy girl, with alabaster skin and albino hair, shimming down Avenue A on sequined roller skates got tangled in her walkman earphones, and tripped over a couple of orange and red club kids shooting up on the concrete. The girl flew through the air landing with her skirt over her head and her naked ass under my table. Furious, she screamed at the club kids, not because she was injured, but that lipstick was all over her white outfit and she’d just washed it a couple of weeks ago. Her rant was impassioned, tear felt – loud. On and on she ranted and wailed, until finally one of the kids offered her a balloon of heroin. The girl smiled, accepted and rolled uptown as if nothing had happened. The kids went back to shooting up and nobody on the street blinked twice about the entire episode.
Of course, to me, it was drama. High art. Opera even. The type of atmospheric backdrop we might have seen if RENT, the Pulitzer Prize winning musical about junkies, transvestites, club kids and struggling bohemians were made by Darren Aronofsky, or Spike Lee – edgy, New York, tragically hilarious.
But instead, the film went to Chris Columbus – Hollywood’s resident family man – and the director of choice when children, magic and domestic issues need to be swirled on the screen and mixed just right for Midwest multiplexes (Columbus’ future projects include titles like – NFL DAD and SLANTED AND ENCHANTED).
Obviously, Columbia had lost their minds. Or had they?
RENT as a piece of theatre, was never exactly documentary musical making. Written by struggling artist Jonathan Larson in the late 1980s, the piece labored and waited almost five years before receiving a major production, and when it finally opened in 1996 at Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, an earnest, in your face production – dated and despite its brassy tone – never really edgy, nominally would have come and gone its merry way in six weeks (okay eight with extensions).
But RENT, on the verge of its opening night received the real life blow that could only be the heartbreaking set up of a Shakespeare drama, a Wagner Opera – or a fairy tale. With Jonathan Larson’s untimely death, RENT became the first Broadway Cinderella story in decades.
A musical that despite its humble beginnings and its author’s anguished attempts to capture his frustrated life in song became a bonafide, glitter filled sensation – Magazine covers, awards, a fashion line at Bloomingdales and fans. Screaming fans. Die hard fans. Young fans. Children. Kids I suspect never set foot in the East Village. Never had that New York experience I had. Never wanted to.
For you see, THIS was their New York experience. A hallmark card version of the real thing. Almost over night, RENT had gone from artist struggle to American pop culture. Safe on 41st street, in a time when dated was suddenly a good thing – there were, after all no real tent cities left on Avenue C, and HIV, while still with us, wasn’t really the horrible death sentence it was in 1987, the show’s otherwise treacly message of hope, love - “No day but today” could suddenly be embraced. The optimism of youth.
It was of course the young who made RENT a sensation. Those original kid fans have grown old and cynical in the ten years that followed. But like PETER PAN and THE WIZARD OF OZ before it, RENT has endured to new generations.
And thus, we come full circle to Chris Columbus. The family man director. And now suddenly we see what Columbia had in mind all along. Never mind that this is East Village light. Columbus has created a fantasia that somehow shimmers with the false reality of the Broadway phenomenon. And I mean shimmer in the best possible way. Never mind the craft – as a piece of film making – it’s a hopeless dud – but as that fairy tale - it succeeds. As a world where the threat of eviction is never really real, where the terminally ill can still sing and dance on tables, where life changing decisions can be made and rescinded in a measure of 40 film frames, the film speaks with the simplistic energy of a bed time story. At times harrowing and scary, but never without the promise of a happy ending.
This is a movie that speaks to the young. An oddly fitting fairy tale for the children of the 21st century. Somewhere, Jonathan Larson is looking down on all of this with I would guess subtle amusement. His pain! His anguish! His high art! Neatly wrapped in Technicolor. His message of hope tagged like a label on a can of Coca Cola. Far, far away from the East Village. Smeared like the lipstick on that ladies white dress. A messy but vibrant encounter. Fleeting. But leaving a big impression on the young kid just watching - waiting for life to begin.
________________________________________________
In 1993, not long after moving to the East Village, I had my first true New York experience. It was about 9:00 AM on a Sunday morning at a sidewalk café in Alphabet City. A fleshy girl, with alabaster skin and albino hair, shimming down Avenue A on sequined roller skates got tangled in her walkman earphones, and tripped over a couple of orange and red club kids shooting up on the concrete. The girl flew through the air landing with her skirt over her head and her naked ass under my table. Furious, she screamed at the club kids, not because she was injured, but that lipstick was all over her white outfit and she’d just washed it a couple of weeks ago. Her rant was impassioned, tear felt – loud. On and on she ranted and wailed, until finally one of the kids offered her a balloon of heroin. The girl smiled, accepted and rolled uptown as if nothing had happened. The kids went back to shooting up and nobody on the street blinked twice about the entire episode.
Of course, to me, it was drama. High art. Opera even. The type of atmospheric backdrop we might have seen if RENT, the Pulitzer Prize winning musical about junkies, transvestites, club kids and struggling bohemians were made by Darren Aronofsky, or Spike Lee – edgy, New York, tragically hilarious.
But instead, the film went to Chris Columbus – Hollywood’s resident family man – and the director of choice when children, magic and domestic issues need to be swirled on the screen and mixed just right for Midwest multiplexes (Columbus’ future projects include titles like – NFL DAD and SLANTED AND ENCHANTED).
Obviously, Columbia had lost their minds. Or had they?
RENT as a piece of theatre, was never exactly documentary musical making. Written by struggling artist Jonathan Larson in the late 1980s, the piece labored and waited almost five years before receiving a major production, and when it finally opened in 1996 at Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, an earnest, in your face production – dated and despite its brassy tone – never really edgy, nominally would have come and gone its merry way in six weeks (okay eight with extensions).
But RENT, on the verge of its opening night received the real life blow that could only be the heartbreaking set up of a Shakespeare drama, a Wagner Opera – or a fairy tale. With Jonathan Larson’s untimely death, RENT became the first Broadway Cinderella story in decades.
A musical that despite its humble beginnings and its author’s anguished attempts to capture his frustrated life in song became a bonafide, glitter filled sensation – Magazine covers, awards, a fashion line at Bloomingdales and fans. Screaming fans. Die hard fans. Young fans. Children. Kids I suspect never set foot in the East Village. Never had that New York experience I had. Never wanted to.
For you see, THIS was their New York experience. A hallmark card version of the real thing. Almost over night, RENT had gone from artist struggle to American pop culture. Safe on 41st street, in a time when dated was suddenly a good thing – there were, after all no real tent cities left on Avenue C, and HIV, while still with us, wasn’t really the horrible death sentence it was in 1987, the show’s otherwise treacly message of hope, love - “No day but today” could suddenly be embraced. The optimism of youth.
It was of course the young who made RENT a sensation. Those original kid fans have grown old and cynical in the ten years that followed. But like PETER PAN and THE WIZARD OF OZ before it, RENT has endured to new generations.
And thus, we come full circle to Chris Columbus. The family man director. And now suddenly we see what Columbia had in mind all along. Never mind that this is East Village light. Columbus has created a fantasia that somehow shimmers with the false reality of the Broadway phenomenon. And I mean shimmer in the best possible way. Never mind the craft – as a piece of film making – it’s a hopeless dud – but as that fairy tale - it succeeds. As a world where the threat of eviction is never really real, where the terminally ill can still sing and dance on tables, where life changing decisions can be made and rescinded in a measure of 40 film frames, the film speaks with the simplistic energy of a bed time story. At times harrowing and scary, but never without the promise of a happy ending.
This is a movie that speaks to the young. An oddly fitting fairy tale for the children of the 21st century. Somewhere, Jonathan Larson is looking down on all of this with I would guess subtle amusement. His pain! His anguish! His high art! Neatly wrapped in Technicolor. His message of hope tagged like a label on a can of Coca Cola. Far, far away from the East Village. Smeared like the lipstick on that ladies white dress. A messy but vibrant encounter. Fleeting. But leaving a big impression on the young kid just watching - waiting for life to begin.
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