Perhaps the stage version of RENT won its Pulizter Prize for the way it dignified the people that society marginalizes out of existence, lumping together the junkies, the drag queens, and the rest who don’t fit into the pigeonholed roles that make the world at large comfortable, giving them a voice an identity beyond the stereotype. RENT the movie, though, despite having most of the original stage production cast, does something at least as egregious as stiff-necked Puritans. It takes these potentially vibrant characters with dreams and hearts and courage and turns them into the mediocrity of the stereotype it was putatively trying to destroy.
This riff on “La Boheme” follows the stories of several inhabitants living la vie boheme, which is also one of the production numbers. Instead of garrets in Paris, it’s grungy lofts in the Big Apple’s Alphabet City, and instead of tuberculosis threatening the lovely courtesan Mimi, it’s AIDS and heroin sucking the life from the lovely stripper, also named Mimi (Rosario Dawson, who wasn’t in the original production).
AIDS and/or HIV features in most of the story lines set during a year in the life starting in 1989: handsome Roger (Adam Pascal) the tortured songwriter grieving over his last girlfriend’s bad end and agonizing over neighbor, Mimi’s explicit advances, Tom Collins (Jessie L. Martin), weathering academia’s dismissal of his latest advances in philosophy, and Angel (Jermaine Heredia), the feisty feisty drag queen with enough flair and fashion sense for the entire borough. Documenting this year in the life is Mark (Alan Rapp, who has trouble expressing any emotion beneath that suspiciously expensive looking haircut), while simultaneously dealing with being dumped by his performance-artist girlfriend, Maureen (a too self-consciously wild-child Idina Menzel) for a lady attorney Joanne (Tracie Thoms). And then there’s the problem of the eponymous rent, being demanded by former fellow bohemian Benny (Taye Diggs as smooth and elegant as ever), who has married well, which is to say into the ownership of the real estate his friends still occupy, which is also the real estate that is standing in the way of his dreams of a building that will generate some income for him and his in-laws. Of course he’s not the only one with dreams. They all have one, be it, longer life, committed partner, artistic integrity. By the time 15 minutes or so have passed, the audience has a dream, too. That would be for something on the screen to get excited about.
The film opens the story up spatially, but emotionally, it’s contracted. The immediacy of a live performance usurped by conventional staging by Chris Columbus, and choreography that doesn’t so much soar as clunk in this context, and that includes Mimi’s performance at a dive bar, which, unaccountably, boasts a stage and lighting worthy of some of the better off-Broadway venues. The welcome exceptions Heredia whose who positively scintillates as Angel, especially during his opening number with gymnastics that manage to transcend the aforementioned problems, and Martin as Tom, who brings a soulful sad-eyed delight in finding true love with his tough-as-nails and very limber paramour.
The suspension of disbelief that makes the delicately drawn artificiality of the musical soar when it works here crashes and burns. With the magic gone, the devices of lyric repetition and lines such as “If you’ll be my queen, I’ll be your moat” are puzzling rather than lyrical. As is the performance piece Maureen stages to protest Benny’s plans that culminates in a group moo and that never rises above a bad parody of the genre.
The riot that ensues seems to be not so much a mob inflamed by art to fight economic injustice as one inflamed by the love of good art to fight the excrescence that they’ve just witnessed.Gender-fluid romance, Sapphic soul mates, and the ci-mentioned production number extolling the wonders of marijuana and masturbation would have been avant-garde fifty years ago, revolutionary thirty years ago, and subversive only twenty years ago. Here and now, though, after Seinfeld’s master of his domain episode has become part of the pop culture landscape and “Will and Grace”, among others, making same-sex coupling about as daring as flan, something more is needed than a thumbed nose at convention to make a work dazzle and RENT, the movie, doesn’t dazzle, in fact it’s barely able to stifle a yawn.
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