When a film begins you have to give yourself over to it or you will never enjoy something that seems outside your immediate interest. Walking into Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys this was exactly my approach. I even told some people around me I didn’t even really want to see it, not because I felt it would be bad, in fact, I thought it would be entirely passable, but trips to the theater to see “passable” movies aren’t exactly what we’re looking for, especially when they’re lacking in energy as this movie is.
That said, in my attempt to give myself over, even as the characters (yes, plural) started breaking the fourth wall in the first scene, I stuck with it. I laughed at Christopher Walken being Christopher Walken as he played Jersey mobster Angelo ‘Gyp’ DeCarlo and I had a fun time trying to figure out just who exactly Vincent Piazza as Tommy DeVito and Erich Bergen as Bob Gaudio reminded me of… the answer was they looked like the sons of Dermot Mulroney and Tate Donovan, but as it turns out that doesn’t really pertain to the film’s plot and should give some idea how invested I was.
Based on the Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, Jersey Boys tells the story of Frankie Valli (Tony Award-winner John Lloyd Young), Tommy DeVito (Piazza), Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) and Bob Gaudio (Bergen) and their rise to become The Four Seasons with, what I can only assume is plenty of dramatic license along the way. It plays the “wrong side of the tracks” story to the hilt and wedges in just about every song the Seasons ever sang and/or released and then fills in several more before the credits begin to roll as if to suggest we actually wanted an encore.
I’m not trying to suggest Jersey Boys is an all-out train wreck, but it begins to overstay its welcome early and just continues to go on and on until it reaches its inevitable conclusion, after which it still has more songs it wants you to listen to, only this time under the glow of a street lamp. I know I didn’t particularly enjoy this film, but I also didn’t hate it. That said, I feel sorry for anyone that does hate it, as it’s a film that feels as if it may never end.
Writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice adapted their own stage musical for the screen and having never seen the Broadway version I can’t tell just how much of it was dedicated to the drama and in-fighting of the four boys, but it becomes so consistent you can pretty much count on it for each and every scene. The only energy the film really finds is in Mike Doyle‘s performance as the band’s producer Bob Crewe. Doyle is the only one given much in the way of freedom and he plays it to the hilt, reminding me of a far more grounded version of Rob Lowe‘s performance in Behind the Candelabra. Two dramatically different characters, but they stand out in similar ways.
As for the boys, Frankie is the doe-eyed, sympathetic lead, Tommy is the ass hole, Nick is near invisible and Bob is the only one not from the old neighborhood, therefore clean of the dirt the other three are rising from. Suffice to say, nothing new here.
I guess, to be entirely fair I also got a kick out of the inclusion of a young Joe Pesci, who’s credited only as Joey and played by Joseph Russo, but it was more out of familiarity with the character and his one line, “Funny how?” which I found curious how few people in the audience laughed at that.
With cinematography once again by Tom Stern (J. Edgar, Hereafter), the film has that same, almost monochrome look with soft white highlights and the hint of smoke around the corner. Accompanying this, when the boys aren’t singing, is the soft piano, letting us know things are about to get dramatic.
There are moments in Jersey Boys where I started to feel as if it just might all work out, but once the third act kicked in I began to fade away as it was a story that seemed to have lost all momentum and was running on the steam of nostalgia. Perhaps if I had a closer relationship with The Four Seasons and their music I’d care more, but since I don’t the film needed to create that sense of closeness and it doesn’t. Had it been a made-for-TV movie and played on one of the networks it would go over like gangbusters, but for a feature film it’s just too bland and lifeless to warrant a trip to the theater.
