Chris Columbus' 2005 attempt to translate the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play to the big screen fell
short of the revolutionary impact it's predecessor had on it's generation. Keeping the cast almost entirely the same
as the original broadway performance, with the substitution of Rosario Dawson as Mimi, was the right idea. Beyond that, it
was all downhill.
The movie opens with the cast standing on the stage of an empty auditorium belting out "Seasons of Love" to... nobody.
Cut to Anthony Rapp riding his bike down a Manhattan street and singing. The lack of transition makes his first scene, and
he is probably the best thing about the movie, almost laughable. To make matters worse, some of the lines that were originally
sung were spoken. This only happened a few times at the beginning of the movie (I know because I've memorized every word
of that soundtrack). It was kind of like they never quite commited to doing it in the first place.
The staging of many of the scenes was also troubling. "I'll Cover You", the song in which Angel and Tom Collins profess
their love for eachother, for example, is performed while the two of them walk down a somewhat busy sidewalk on a sunny
day. The intensity is completely lost in the busy and distracting surroundings. It was almost as if this song, which in the
play held so much weight, was a mere afterthought.
I went to see it with a bunch of my girlfriends, none of whom had seen the play, and the general reaction was that it
was "cute." Cute? Cute!? I thought! It's about AIDS and drug addicts and homelessness and death. It's about sacrificing your
ideals in order to stay warm. It should have been gritty and eye-opening, as Jonathan Larson intended it to be. But it wasn't.
It was "cute"
