Jersey Boys
Rated R
Director: Clint Eastwood
HHHH
Reviewed by Sandra Hall
JERSEY Boys is packed with old-fashioned movie musical cliches.
Its plot features a dizzying rise to fame and an equally vertiginous fall, and it is full of eureka moments those scenes in which a new composition is instantly transformed into a hit thanks to a bit of harmoniously executed impro visation.
It even has a gangster with a heart of gold.
Christopher Walken shrugs off his sinister side to play a New Jersey mob boss who is reduced to tears every time Frankie Valli, lead singer of boy band the Four Seasons, launches into song.
Clint Eastwood is the director who elected to film the stage hit about the Four Seasons' career. It is a surprising match, because Eastwood's taste in music is less inclined to pop than jazz of the complicated kind celebrated in Bird, his 1988 biopic about saxophone player Charlie Parker.
Eastwood's talents were tapped, we are told, because the Four Seas ons had a tenuous connection with jazz as a result of their beginnings in the big-band era, but I'm guessing Eastwood was more excited by the fact this is a show-business story with an edge.
Like Frank Sinatra, who came from the same neighbourhood as the fictional characters in The Sopranos, the band had admirers in the Mob and, in the film, Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), their lead guitarist and self-appointed manager, is happy to cultivate them.
If DeVito were smarter, he could be called the group's evil genius. As it is, he is an urger and black comic irritant.
His cockiness and ability to talk faster than anyone else in the picture kick-start the group's career before becoming a liability.
DeVito is the one who brings Valli into the band.
Valli is still a teenager, but is already learning to make the most of the tenor falsetto, which will distinguish the group from all the other young hopefuls haunting the record producers in New York's pop mecca, the Brill Building, but they desperately need new songs.
And so to their discovery of Bob Gaudio, a musician, singer and songwriter whose feeling for the four-part harmony will eventually generate their string of hits.
Eastwood has chosen his leads from those who performed in one or more of the stage productions, a decision which works well.
Because they are unfamiliar screen faces, you are not dazzled by star power when it comes to immersing yourself in the film's evocation of 1950s New Jersey.
I'm not sure why the film's designers have chosen a palette keyed to the colour of dry sand, but the neighbourhood's rough-edged mixture of folksy street wisdom and criminality still comes through.
DeVito and the band's towering bass singer and guitarist, Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), bounce in and out of jail for the first 15 minutes or so for petty crimes.
They have more to do with ineptitude than greed or malice, and DeVito's monologues to camera a device im ported from the show strike exactly the right tone. It's Goodfellas lite.
The group dynamic is the wellspring of the action.
So, too, are the loneliness and tedium of life on the road. Marriages implode or simply wither away and the group itself begins to crack under the strain.
The script's black comic highlight comes from the usually phlegmatic Massi.
At one point, he lets fly with a sustained rant about the horrors of having to share a room with DeVito, whose many sins range from his profligate use of hotel towels to never shutting up.
The screenplay is by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who did the book for the show.
Although they don't indulge in gag writing at the expense of character, they do have a sharp ear for a one-liner. Brick man, in particular, has a distinguished cinema pedigree as Woody Allen's collaborator on the scripts for Annie Hall and Manhattan, and he and Elice have plenty to work with here.
There is a glittering cast of supporting characters.
Mike Doyle camps it up to scene-stealing effect as the shrewd and innovative record producer Bob Crewe, and Joseph Russo seems entirely powered by nervous energy as the youthful Joe Pesci, who will go on to play a character called Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.
Most important of all, Eastwood seamlessly integrates all those great songs into the action, without any of those anticipatory pauses that so often blight screen musicals.
Not so old-fashioned, after all.
