Some things, you just can’t translate on film
Musicals and stage productions feed off live audiences, which just isn’t there in movies
NEW YORK — Maybe it sounds a little perverse, but I usually try to avoid seeing any movies made from stage plays or musicals I have particularly enjoyed. A natural curiosity about how the material has been translated into a new medium tends to be outweighed by a general foreboding born of past experience. Too often the particular delights of a stage production evaporate considerably — if not entirely — in the translation.
The last few months have, alas, confirmed my commitment to avoidance. For various reasons I broke my rule and caught the movie versions of two shows I adored: the headbanging, hair-band jukebox musical Rock of Ages and the stiletto-sharp off-Broadway comedy Bachelorette. Oh, dude. Oh, dear. Although the movies are different in scale — Rock of Ages is a bigger-budget, star-bloated production, while Bachelorette is an indie picture directed by Leslye Headland, the author of the play — both had me wincing more often than I laughed. The dispiriting part is trying to keep intact in your memory file the delight you took in the material onstage when it has been so thoroughly flattened onscreen — to say nothing of trying to explain its allure to people who saw only the movie version. How many ways can you say, “You kind of had to be there”?
Making plays work as movies is always challenging, but comedies and musicals pose particular problems that often prove insurmountable. Both genres rely more deeply than drama on the immediacy of the audience’s response. Although you hear the occasional sob during a fine production of Death of a Salesman or King Lear, the reactions of the audience do not really become part of the rhythm of a dramatic play onstage.
But with comedies and musicals the laughter (and, at musicals, the applause) weaves its way into the texture of the material, feeding the actors and warming up the room. The audience is a participant in the production, and as actors will firmly attest, a bum audience can let the air out of the balloon pretty definitively.
Obviously at the cineplex the audience is still present, but the rhythm of the movie can’t be relaxed to accommodate it. Film is immutable once it’s in the can — metaphorically speaking, in this digital age. Moviemakers have to somehow negotiate this new distance between the material and the audience, and it can prove a treach- erous proposition.
Rock of Ages, perhaps more than most musicals, drew directly on the enthusiasm of the audience to sustain and support its deliriously silly story of a wannabe rock star and a sweet-but-hot ingenue searching for love and fame on the hard streets of 1980s Los Angeles. Crucial to the show’s rapport with its audience was the narrator, who continually joshed the material itself, acknowledging its absurdity and encouraging us to indulge it. The director of the movie, Adam Shankman, doesn’t seem to have recognized that keeping the material stylized would be crucial to maintaining its appeal. He opted for a straight-ahead, quasi-naturalistic approach that drains the musical’s winking, self-conscious spirit.
The sad part: Russell Brand, cast in the role of the nightclub worker who in the stage version was also the narrator and the show’s anarchic heart, is just about the best thing in the movie. Had he been given free rein to rule over the proceedings as his character did onstage, things might have turned out much better. Instead Shankman shoehorned a bunch of mostly miscast stars into the movie: Alec Baldwin, mugging gamely as the owner of the rock club in dire straits; a notably humourless Tom Cruise, whose role as the preening rocker Stacee Jaxx was unwisely expanded to accommodate his celebrity; and an entirely unnecessary Catherine Zeta-Jones as the uptight villainess.
In stark contrast to the creators of the stage version, Shankman, who directed the mediocre but better movie version of the musical Hairspray, obviously had no real affinity for the music or the seedy milieu of Rock of Ages.
I can’t say I hoped for much from a Hollywood makeover of the scrappy Rock of Ages. But the fact that the author of the play was at the helm of the movie version of Bachelorette at least gave cause for hope. Here, too, things have gone seriously awry.
Stylized, broad comedy, whether of a literary or a physical kind, has a bit more room to breathe onstage. Trapped inside a medium shot or a close-up, jokes that tickle your ribs can feel more like a punch in the gut, and the acerbic spirit of Bachelorette often curdles into sour shrillness in the movie version, which stars Kirsten Dunst as the queen mean girl in charge of an impromptu bachelorette party that turns into an epic disaster.
Even more problematic is the diffusion of the tension that the stage version sustained, as the single setting has been “opened up” to avoid trapping the movie inside a hotel room. Getting away from the proscenium is generally considered a necessity when translating plays to the movies, but it often proves more a liability. The stage Bachelorette drew most of its spark from the tart interaction between the three lead female characters. But the giddy helium generated by the girls’ bitchy sparring is thoroughly dissipated by the movie’s emphasis on the mechanics of plot.
Most dispiriting is Headland’s decision to try to pander to the Katherine Heigl-loving rom-com crowd by expanding the story’s emphasis on the characters’ relationships with men. Sure, Dunst maintains a savage demeanour in her bathroom tryst, while Lizzy Caplan and Isla Fisher bitch and moan in high style as her supremely catty and supremely messy sidekicks. But the real novelty of Bachelorette onstage was the absence of sentimentality about young love that has somehow sneaked in the back door of the movie version. The play was all edges; the movie softens more than a few of them.
Of course, some of the great movie comedies started out onstage — The Front Page, The Philadelphia Story — and while I am not a great fan of a lot of the movies made from Broadway musicals, there are notable exceptions to the rule in that genre, too. But the track record in recent years is fairly dubious. The Producers was a veritable fiasco, and I am perhaps in a minority in finding that the sizzle of Chicago mostly fizzled on film.
Coming down the pike is a movie adaptation of August: Osage County, one of the best (and funniest) new American plays of recent years. Dare I admit I’m not optimistic?