Jersey Boys opens in theaters nationwide on June 20th
From the very opening shot, I had a feeling Jersey Boys wasn’t going to be for me. My feelings were proven correct without any question about an hour or so in. And by the time the closing credits finally started rolling after 134 minutes, I felt certain I had just seen director Clint Eastwood finally craft his very own high school musical.
That opening shot started me off sour because it features thickly accented Jersey slickster Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) talking directly to the camera in an energetic manner. Tommy tells us all about how The Four Seasons, the seminal 1960s band he founded after bringing singer Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young) into the fold, would never have gone anywhere if it weren’t for him. You get the sense that Tommy isn’t a reliable narrator… but that at least he IS our narrator. Nope, you’d be wrong there. Because at some point, other members of the band also start talking to us, and we’ll start to see some of the events through their skewed perspective. This device is apparently pulled directly from the award-winning stage musical of the same name, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who also adapted their work into this screenplay. It simply does not translate well.
I went into this film as cold as any in recent memory. I didn’t even know the movie was about Frankie Valli until minutes before I left the house to see it, when my wife told me she’d heard about it on NPR. All I knew was that it was a Clint Eastwood film, so I was okay with making the time for it as I love me some Clint. So I didn’t know I was watching a film adapted from a musical, but man does this adaptation fail at being a good movie. I would imagine that the admittedly catchy music was probably a draw to the stage show. Even as a non-fan of the film, and a non-fan of the style of music that Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons created… I’ve still been catching myself singing “Sherry” and “Working My Way Back To You” all week. But I genuinely found the supposedly silky vocals of this character to be jarring and awful… and if even the very music of a musically-set film is turning you off, there’s really nowhere else that it can grab you.
But it tries. It tries to grab you with the worst of biopic clichés. We watch our band members grow up (we know because their hairstyles change), have internal strife, get in fights with their spouses about how they’re always touring, struggle with holding on to their “street life” ways… and you absolutely can’t help but feel like you’ve seen it a million times in other, better biopics. Walk The Line and Ray are now nine and ten years old, respectively, and even they weren’t so much original in their approach as simply responsible for re-popularizing the biopic format. Jersey Boys feels like the worst mix of those decade-old films and Goodfellas that you could possibly imagine, adding nothing new or better to those films’ formulas.
Even though I was put off by the characters talking directly to the audience from the start, for a little while I felt like the film had a shot at at least being passingly entertaining because for a fair amount of run time, it offers a light and energetic tone reminiscent of That Thing You Do. I laughed at some of the jokes, felt a little bit of that energy that can only come from watching a few “just like us” kind of people breaking through to success and writing some amazing pop hits. I thought “Hey, if this film stays light, airy, and energetic, maybe it won’t be so bad”. But then it starts to go for the drama. And every dark turn it takes feels increasingly unearned and poorly developed. Not to mention that it takes forever to get there. And even then, when you feel like the end is nigh and Tommy DeVito’s penchant for borrowing dirty money has gotten the band into a “rock bottom” type of situation, the screenplay does this crazy Tarantino-esque time break that pulls you back to two years earlier and you realize you are stuck in this movie for another 45 minutes at least. Why they couldn’t have just developed this money borrowing conflict naturally as the timeline moved along in real time is beyond me, but I’m certain the intended effect wasn’t to have the audience groan and brace themselves for a way longer third act than was necessary.
I’m sure the Jersey Boys stage musical is wonderful for fans of that kind of thing. I’m not a fan of that kind of thing. But I can open myself up to new experiences and would have been willing to embrace Jersey Boys as a film if it had been willing to open itself up to being anything more than a failed adaptation and a retread of biopic tropes we’ve seen a million times. I still love Clint Eastwood, but I can’t wrap my brain around what he thought he had here with this dead-in-the-water film. Maybe he’s just a really big Frankie Valli fan? Maybe the success of the stage show convinced everyone involved that a big screen version would be a sure fire hit, regardless of whether they actually added anything cinematic to the experience? And who knows… maybe it WILL be a big hit? It failed for me on almost every level and you won’t find me working my way back to Jersey Boys anytime soon.
And I’m Out.