Josh Reviews Jersey Boys
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story didn’t make much of a splash when it was released back in 2007, but it think it’s a hysterical, brilliant skewering of the musical biopic genre. It makes it hard to take any of these sorts of films seriously ever again after having seen it. While watching Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the successful Broadway show, I found myself often thinking back to Walk Hard. Jersey Boys isn’t bad. It’s a competently made, enjoyable film. But it’s so by the numbers, so formulaic in the way it hits all of the usual musical biopic cliche scenes — all the cliches so ruthlessly exposed in Walk Hard, right down to an ending set many years later at an awards show — that I found myself wishing I was watching Walk Hard, which at east had a sense of humor about the whole thing!
Jersey Boys tells the story of the rise and fall of the Four Seasons. The film’s focus is on Frankie Valli, born Francesco Stephen Castelluccio, a nice kid from Jersey with a unique, gorgeous voice. As the film unfolds we watch Frankie’s early struggles, the band’s breakthrough and enormous successes, and then the problems that tore the group apart.
Periodically, one of the characters will stop in the middle of the scene to address the audience. I love that device (from what I have read, this was taken from the stage show). The movie always comes to life when one of the characters stops the proceedings to give us his insight. I wish it happened more often, or that the rest of the film had an ounce of the fun and playfulness that we see in those moments.
The best aspect of this film is the music. Those Four Seasons songs were hits for a reason. It’s huge fun to hear them recreated here, and the four actors cast as the Four Seasons sure do have their musical chops. (Three of the four leads also appeared in the Broadway show.). (I wonder why they didn’t hire the fourth!)
But while all of the leads are talented musically, I never found myself that invested in any of their characters. This is the fault of the script and the directing, I feel. All four of the Jersey Boys remain pretty one-dimensional throughout the film. I was particularly disappointed in how superficial a portrayal we wound up getting of Frankie Valli. I like the actor (a dead ringer for a young John Travolta), but his character is flat. Frankie is presented as a nice, good boy in the beginning, and he is presented like that all the way through. It feels like something of a whitewash. We see scenes in which, after the band’s initial success, he avoids going out with the boys to party, in order for him to be with his family, like a good boy would do. Then there is one brief scene in which we see another woman riding in a car with him, and one line of dialogue that hints that perhaps he was behaving an affair or maybe sleeping around, and then in the very next scene he’s getting a divorce. Why did the film gloss over actually showing us any of his misbehavior? This is how by-the-numbers the movie is. It’s like the movie knows that we’ve all seen these types of movies before, and we all know that when the band gets its initial success, that’s when the lead character starts having marital problems. So instead of actually SHOWING us that plot/character development, the film assumes we know what’s gonna happen and just skips right over it. It is super-weird!
The actors are all clearly having fun, and their enthusiasm, along with the dynamite music, helps the first half of the film work. But by the second half, I found myself getting bored. By the time we get to the ending, set decades later (in which the group reunites to be inducted into the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame), I was rolling my eyes. The old-age makeup on the young actors in those scenes was not impressive, to say the least, though that was the least of the ending’s problems. It just felt way too easy, way to obvious, way too superficial.
Jersey Boys is a perfectly fine, enjoyable film. I had a fine time watching it. I’m mostly bummed because it feels like it had the potential to have been something far more. Oh well.