Rent (2005)

On the night my wife and I watched this film, we were supposed to watch Rocky Balboa. When the DVD we checked out from the local library turned out to be too scratched to watch beyond the first 30 minutes, I was disappointed. After watching this Broadway hit adapted to film, I was beyond disappointed. Musical theater may be alive and well in New York City but the journey from Broadway glamour to Hollywood glory is a map that’s proven difficult to find.

The story begins late in 1989 and spans a little over a year. The main characters are young, struggling artists and their friends. There’s a Jewish wannabe filmmaker, an ex-junkie musician with writer’s block, an anarchist philosophy professor, a drag queen, a night club dancer and ‘performance artist.’ Several of these characters are HIV-positive and suffering from AIDS. The film documents their struggles to make due, fulfill their goals and find success without ‘selling out.’

I’ve never seen a stage production of Rent, so I have no idea if the film makes any great departures from the source material. What it doesn’t deviate from enough is the staginess of many of its musical numbers. I’m always willing to cut a musical some slack for including unrealistic elements to musical numbers (i.e. dancing atop restaurant tables while singing and not getting kicked out). I’m nowhere near cynical enough to dock points for that kind of stuff.

What I can and will dock points for is framing a scene as if it were being performed on a stage. Blocking for the stage and choreographing for film are two separate beasts that should not be treated as if they are interchangeable. There are times when this film under-utilizes the skills of its editor in order to show off some extended choreography. There are certainly times to run extended shots and refrain from constant quick cuts but the wonderful part of film is that musical numbers don’t have to consist of just a handful of shots. You should use the added dimension film provides to take us through the musical number rather than watching from a distance, which happens a few times too many.

Rent does a pretty good job of creating and bringing us into a self-contained world and several interior sets look convincing enough. The trouble lies mostly with the exteriors. The city block that our characters live on looks too much like an elaborate stage prop, especially during outdoor musical numbers. With a $40 million budget, you’d think they could have done some exterior location shoots.

One crucial element that I found the film to be lacking is quality singing. That’s right- Rent falls short in probably the most important component to its genre. I’m no music expert but it sounds to me like two or three of the actors are off key quite a bit. That’s very distracting and makes it a hard song to enjoy. There is also a lot of what I call 'singposition' (singing exposition). Regular lines don’t need to be sung. As far as I’m concerned, the songs in musicals serve as a fun tangent to the actual story. If you have important information to convey to the audience, just say it and leave the songs for expressing emotions and other fluffy stuff. Otherwise you run the risk of having too many musical moments in a film, which can actually turn some viewers off.

While Rent tries to be a lot of things, I felt that the filmmakers could have included more of the struggles of the gay and HIV-positive characters. Sure, the filmmaker character has his eyes opened to their world but the audience never sees enough of it to feel the weight bearing down on their shoulders. We hear AIDS patients talk about some issues but even the character who dies of AIDS doesn’t look as far gone physically as he probably should have. The film could have been more powerful had we seen more of the end-of-life struggle many AIDS patients suffer.

Also, there was only the slightest bit of alienation and mistrust directed at the gay and HIV-positive characters. This is the late 80s and early 90s we’re talking about, folks. Anyone who remembers that era can tell you there would have been more prejudice and paranoia aimed at some of our leads.

On a personal note, I absolutely abhor any glorification or romanticizing of the bohemian lifestyle. Living in poverty is not glorious or virtuous, it’s living in poverty. Some of the characters come off a tad pretentious in their aims of living like a free spirit in order to maintain their artistic integrity. There does come a point in life where you need to drop the ego, suck it up and admit that things aren’t working. There’s nothing wrong with moving on to Plan B while still holding onto something you’re passionate about. The whole free-wheeling, live-for-love stuff always makes me want to retch.

Fans of the stage production will almost certainly enjoy this film but I have to wonder how broad a target audience was ever really possible. Elements of the story are intriguing and can even prove informative if you know nothing about AIDS, but it doesn’t seem to go far enough to hammer home the chilling reality behind the disease. Rent is one of those films with a pre-fabricated audience that largely doesn’t include me and it struggles to make a clean transition from stage to screen.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5