Musty Eastwoodian misjudgment
šš JERSEY BOYS. Director: Clint Eastwood. Starring: John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza, Christopher Walken. Showing at: Nu Metro Walmer Park. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin In 2005, the stage musical, Jer
sey Boys, blew the dust off the collected works of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, delighting audiences on Broadway and in the West End of London. Nine years later, in adapting the stage show for the cinema, Clint Eastwood has pulled the trick in reverse, delivering a film so grey and musty, it should probably be inspected on public health grounds for mildew.
The problem is immediately and heartbreakingly apparent. Rather than embracing the jangling song-and-dance numbers that made the live version box-office catnip, Eastwood sheepishly tidies them into the background, treating the project instead like a standard music industry biopic.
The original Broadway cast has been reunited for the occasion, including John Lloyd Young as a truly uncanny Valli, but they’re barely allowed to dance a step. Both the music and its trappings – Valli’s pugnacious, swaggering falsetto, the thick, sweet harmonies, the snap of eight well-polished shoes stamping in sync – feel so incidental to the story that it virtually qualifies as period detail.
Instead, it’s the band’s fantastically tedious internal squabbles that the film obsesses over, many of which are related either to their entanglement with Christopher Walken’s owlish mobster, or the mounting debts of Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza).
Imagine if the makers of Mamma Mia! had decided that audiences wouldn’t be coming to their film for the Abba songs at all, but for a melodrama. This is the scale of the misjudgment.
In fact, the only fully-fledged production number in the entirety of Jersey Boys appears during the film’s end credits: it consists of the cast shuffling awkwardly down a plywood street to the strains of December 1963 (Oh, What a Night) and may be the most miserably heterosexual musical routine in the history of cinema. Why have Eastwood and his writers, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, adapting their own book from the Broadway production, been so reluctant to throw off caution and embrace fabulousness? A film genre in which people spontaneously burst into song doesn’t particularly allow for surliness, but here, the mood is glowering and downbeat.
Female characters are either short-term playthings or long-term irritants, while queeny record industry types are something to be endured with a raised eyebrow. The photography is staid, drab and desaturated – visually, the film is almost indistinguishable from Eastwood’s gloomy 2011 J Edgar Hoover biopic, down to the lousy old-age make-up.
Music is far from uncharted territory for Eastwood. His 1988 film, Bird, about the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, won Forest Whitaker the best actor prize at Cannes, while in 1982, he directed himself as an ailing country singer in Honkytonk Man. These were solid Eastwoodian pictures, but in both of them, music carried the narrative like a current.
Here, the songs are just something they make and sell, to the extent they might as well be on stage sawing wood. Red velvet suits have never looked so beige. – The Telegraph