Low Rent

This week, I watched the movie version of the musical Rent. I had sort of intended to catch it in the theater late last year, but it somehow slipped by. I think that was partly because a co-worker of mine, a bit of a mild "Rent Head" (as I've learned that fans of the musical actually do call themselves), had caught the movie and told me it was vastly inferior to the production of the play he'd seen. Still, he pushed the Original Broadway Cast soundtrack my way to expose me to the music.

The music, as it turns out, was really the saving grace of the film. The songs alone, I'd probably rate an A-. It's high quality, driving rock opera, with a sprinkling of other styles -- gospel, tango, and more. The "minus" I'm tacking on there is because no matter how catchy and clever I find the music, I didn't find myself moved by it emotionally. Moved to tap my feet, absolutely. Two different things.

And if the music stumbled a bit for me in that regard, the movie supporting it fell flat on its face. I never found myself really caring for any of the characters at any point. There are films with major character deaths that still get me no matter how many times I've seen them. This film had moments of death that didn't shake me at all. I could see the actors on screen really working it. Clearly, their performances were genuine -- I didn't feel like they were "manufacturing" emotion for the camera. But it just wasn't getting through.

When I popped in the deleted scenes, I started to get an idea why. One of them is an extended, five-minute sequence involving a song from the second act of the original play ("Goodbye Love"). The song not only covers a break-up between the major couple in the story, but a falling out between the two roommates living together. This second part I found particularly compelling, as one of the characters has AIDS, while the other does not. In the song, the issue of how the latter will have to go on after the former dies comes up. This song actually managed to speak to me in a way that none of the material in the final edit of the film actually did.

So, "what the hell?" I asked myself. I saw the deleted scenes had a commentary from the director, Chris Columbus. So I decided to listen and see what possible reason he had for cutting what I believed to be the most effective scene in the movie. His logic came in two parts:

• Two of these characters had not been shown in the film singing to each other. All their scenes had been actual dialogue. To show them suddenly singing was jarring.
  
  
• This song followed a funeral scene, and he felt that it was too much depression to follow all in sequence... that the audience simply couldn't take any more.
  

I call complete and utter bullshit on both of these statements. To the first, I say: if you're 1 hour, 45 minutes into a musical and you have not earned some suspension of disbelief from your audience that your characters are going to spontaneously sing to one another from time to time, I think you've got some far more serious problems than one five-minute scene covers. To the second, I say: this is a film/play about AIDS. It's supposed to be depressing.

I kept the commentary on as an alternate ending to the film played. It was a "bookend" to the opening credits, which showed the entire cast singing on a stage in an empty theater, out of the context of the story. This cut ending put them back on that stage for the final number.

Time for some more bullshit Chris Columbus logic. One of his arguments for cutting this ending was that when it faded up, there was a long moment of disorientation for the audience. "Where are we now?" they would ask. They didn't recognize that we were back on the stage from the opening. Apparently, he thinks the audience attention span is so low that we can't recall what happened just two hours ago.

So this all really got me wondering. This film I'd just finished watching... the film I'd probably rate a C but for the music and phenomenal singing I'd rate an A- (does that mean it averages out to a B- or something?). This was apparently a "production" of Rent as rendered by a director who appears to underestimate the intelligence of his audience at every turn.

Perhaps this means that an actual, theatrical production of the original musical might be far more to my liking than the film? Well, that would certainly be consistent with what my co-worker told me months ago when this movie was in the theaters. Innnnnteresting. Maybe someday I'll have the chance to put that to the test. (Assuming I can actually sit in a theater and not crack up thinking about the Rent parody in the movie Team America: World Police -- "Everyone has AIDS! AIDS, AIDSAIDSAIDS, AIDS!!")

In the meantime, I think I might start looking at Chris Columbus' two Harry Potter films (the first two) in a much dimmer light now.