Jersey Boys review

                Both as an actor and as a filmmaker, director Clint Eastwood has become synonymous with working class, blue collar American romanticism. His best movies are no-nonsense genre staples that give actors enough room to breathe and explore their characters, in stories that vibrate in the margins between Speilbergian optimism and the darker shades of the types of 70s films in which he once stared.  It’s a tricky balance to strike every time and as he grows older, struggling to differentiate a chair from a responsive human being, he also seems to have a harder time distinguishing the good cinematic ideas from the bad.

                In his most recent offering, “Jersey Boys”, based on a Tony award winning Broadway production, Eastwood curiously tries to ape Scorsese’s greatest hits, as he portrays the popular soda-shop pop-rock band Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons as self-made wise guys, struggling to keep their egos in check long enough to make the money and get the respect they never had growing up on the streets. And in attempting to bridge the tone of a Broadway musical with the grit of something like a “Mean Streets” or “Goodfellas”, the movie never finds a comfortable identity of its own. Instead, the whole thing wobbles around like a confused drunk prostitute, trying on styles she can’t afford in stores she doesn’t belong in.

                With that said, Clint likes his actors and his movies always accommodate their needs and talents, and even here newcomers like John Lloyd Young, as the passive Frankie Valli, fills the role with earnest desire and interior complexity while his character is passed around and forced into crime and/or fame by his frienemy Tommy DeVito, played by “Boardwalk Empire” actor Vincent Piazza. Piazza channels a youthful De Niro as the selfish but charismatic guitar player and lights up every scene he’s in with familiar, yet effortless energy.  Other characters, such as Christopher Walken as the mobster kingpin Gyp DeCarlo and Mike Doyle as the band’s flamboyant producer Bob Crewe, keep things light, even as the messy screenplay attaches more and more narrative weight.

                Unfortunately, performances alone couldn’t save this movie from its inherent problems. The plot skims the specifics of the band’s rock and roll history during the 50s and 60, instead focusing on the “Behind the Music” gossip of interpersonal tensions, affairs and legal scuffles, before eventually downing in 20 unearned minutes of drama between a washed up Vali and his teenage daughter that we never got to know as a character up to that point. Stylistically, Eastwood oscillates between stagey camera set pieces and blocking that resembles edited close ups on the proscenium and distractingly unoriginal tracking shots where the characters break the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly.

                The one thing that could have saved this Broadway adaptation--the music-- is far too understated and sometimes just avoided to make room for the multi-stranded plot and the shifts in character perspective. When we finally do get barely contextualized performances of Four Seasons’ standards such as Sherry and Big Girls Don’t Cry, it only underlines the movie’s missed opportunity. There’s no lack of ambition in “Jersey Boys” but it what it does lack is the discipline and finesse required to keep a biopic of this scope from tripping allover itself.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/July-2014