Musicals are practically scientifically designed to lift your spirits. Plots be damned, you can’t help but feel a little exhilarated after more than two hours of watching people cut a rug while singing about their innermost feelings. It’s a fundamental principle that has allowed Broadway titans like Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber to reimagine tragic love stories and gothic horror thrillers into audience-pleasing spectacles about murder, revenge and, most terrifying of all, having to deal with a needy and selfish protagonist. actor. Even when they end in heartbreak and despair, you still leave the theater humming their catchiest earworms on an endorphin high (or, if you’ve just watched “Cats” for the first time , perhaps a different type of euphoria).
So what happens when you hire the 21st century authority on cinematic melancholy that is Clint Eastwood to turn your Broadway hit into a movie? You get “Jersey Boys,” probably one of the most downbeat and dour musicals ever put on screen. If you’ve ever wondered whether “Mystic River” or even “Million Dollar Baby” might be a little less depressing if their characters sang about their emotions between moments of anguish, loss and turmoil, the answer, judging by the results here. , it’s… not really. Yet while it’s not hard to see why “Jersey Boys” was a failure upon its release in 2014, that same sadness also makes it unique in the modern cinematic music landscape.
Eastwood’s Jersey Boys appeals to anti-Broadway audiences
Eastwood’s darkly grounded portrayal of the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll sensation, the Four Seasons’ rapid rise to fame and the good (and mostly bad) times that followed is truer to its source material than you don’t think so. The original Broadway jukebox musical written by Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman (yes, as in the Oscar-winning co-writer “Annie Hall”) eschews the idea of being a fantasy depiction of the band’s history, presenting itself like something akin to a concert. theater documentary. Consistent with this, The Man With No Name generally avoids the kind of flights of fancy one would find in a musical biopic like “Rocketman.” Instead, almost every song is diegetic and presented in a realistic light (end credits aside), whether it’s the Seasons singing live in sequences that Eastwood and his trusty director of the photography Tom Stern thundered while shooting with their typical, steady, no-fuss cover art and subdued black and brown color palette or the band’s music used as the soundtrack for montages, many of which tend to focus on the beats saddest of the history of the group.
You end up with a movie that feels a bit like a disappointing version of “That Thing You Do!” …and that’s even before the Seasons’ breakout success (thanks to timeless pop classics like “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry”) was sullied by the group’s internal struggles, debts crowds and family difficulties. But where Tom Hanks’ musical comedy-drama about a fictional ’60s band skyrocketing the Billboard charts mostly manages to offset its mawkish nostalgia with more sober moments, Eastwood’s relentlessly tough approach clashes with scenes where “Jersey Boys” wants to be lighter. -heartfelt and charming. Most people also agree on this point, as evidenced in the film. Rotten Tomatoes Notes (51 percent of critics, with an audience score only slightly higher at 62 percent) and a disappointing box office showing ($67 million worldwide against a budget of $40 million).
Yet with its soulful music, themes of flawed masculinity and a melancholy story about the price of a life spent in the spotlight, “Jersey Boys” is certainly as personal as anything Eastwood has ever made. Despite its missteps, it even succeeds as, essentially, an anti-Broadway audience and that all-too-rare specimen of a musical that may actually leave you more disheartened than when you started. (You know, if that’s your thing.)
