JERSEY BOYS

Part of the power of stage and screen is to make the audience feel like they are somewhere they aren’t supposed to be.

The very best films and the very best shows find a way to lift us up out of our seats and bring us into the story. The narrative takes us by the hand and ushers us around the party, giving us a close glimpse at all the personalities gathered while it gossips in our ear about their accomplishments and misdeeds. The stories that are told best make us feel like a part of them. Take that image above, for instance. A great storyteller will take the audience beyond those bleachers, away from that television, and put them right in the middle of those four smiling musicians.

When that power isn’t tapped into, the storyteller might as well park us in a folding chair in front of the TV and ask if there’s anything else they can offer us.

I wish I could tell you JERSEY BOYS avoided that mistake.

JERSEY BOYS is the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. When we meet the group, they are a trio called The Variety Trio made up of Nick Massi, and the DeVito Brothers – Tommy and Nick. Besides being performers, the three of them are also neighbourhood hoods, pulling a ridiculous amount of petty larceny and doing the cha-cha in and out of jail. Their music seems to be one of the few things that keeps them from getting in serious trouble; that and a little bit of protection from mobster Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken).

The boys’ fortunes catch a few breaks though and things begin to look up when they fold a nice boy from the neighbourhood into the group. With Frankie Valli on-board – and his angelic voice – the group begins to have notions of success beyond the seedy bars of their working class Jersey hood.

The next break is when they are introduced to Bob Gaudio, who has already written a few big hits. When he hears Frankie sing, he believes that he needs to write songs for that amazing voice he’s hearing. The trick is to come up with something original…something that doesn’t sound derivative. A song – or better yet, several – that will harness that energy and attitude and turn it into success. Luckily for all involved, lightning strikes.

With Nick out and Frankie & Bob in, the group rechristens themselves The Four Seasons. Soon thereafter, the hits start coming. “Cherie”, “Walk Like a Man”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”…their success is staggering. But if you think that hitting it big is the end of their troubles, then you only know half the story…

As a stage musical, JERSEY BOYS isn’t tremendously complicated. There is very little trickery of staging, no complicated choreography, no original adaptation where the music is concerned (which makes sense). In many ways, it’s a really good Four Seasons revue with a bit of dramatic flare running through it for good measure. So one could be forgiven if one hoped that a film adaptation could pick up a bit of the slack and infuse this jukebox musical with a little bit of panache. Maybe…just maybe…tools like photography, editing, and scope could be used to heighten the story of these musical legends.

No such luck.

Not only does JERSEY BOYS not up the ante on what the Tony-Award-winning show had already established, but it actually lets all the air out of the musical balloon and plays things more like a bio-pic than a musical. It has less in common with CHICAGO and MOULIN ROUGE! and more in common with RAY and WALK THE LINE. This is a wasted opportunity since “The Four Seasons Story” could have been told any time over the last thirty years.

To graft a story so straight forward on to an award-winning musical is a complete disservice. What’s more, the complete film goes by feeling static, joyless, and flat. For a film that gets to employ some of the best-known songs in rock history, it stays inexplicably silent for long stretches of time. It’s less a celebration of music than an awkward reception after a dull music history lecture. Even the film’s emotional payoff – the arrival and success of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” – is heartbreakingly toothless.

We’ve watched the band climb and then suddenly fall. We’ve watched Frankie do something stupidly noble and then grow bitter about it. We’ve come to a place where we all want to build up slowly the way this iconic song does, and let loose with that wonderful chorus. But we don’t get it. The song is jarringly cut in half between the studio and a club, taking away all emotional payoff.

What’s more, that memorable horn section in the song – the thing poor Frankie has been wanting the whole damned movie – is fluffed off like it’s nothing. This is a moment that makes the heart soar during the stage show is reduced to being just another song…sung well, but captured so poorly with no spiritual lift.

The crazy thing is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with turning in a straight bio-pic, and for a moment, one seems resigned to walk away from JERSEY BOYS and shrug “Okay, I guess”. But then something unexpected happens… Just before the credits, the film hits us with a curtain call of “Cherie” and “Oh What a Night!”…and it’s glorious.

The sequence is fluid, it’s joyful, it’s raucous, it’s intricately staged, splendidly shot, and wonderfully dreamlike. It makes audiences clap and sing, and hits us square in the chest since it feels like such a shift in gears from the everything we’ve just seen over the last two hours. It’s everything JERSEY BOYS should have been…but wasn’t.

It proves that Clint Eastwood is capable of staging and capturing something grand, but chose not to. Either he didn’t trust the audience to go with such a break from reality, or didn’t trust the story to support it. No matter which, it’s a fatal error. Without this coda, the film would have felt like a D-student. With it though, it hands us the report card littered with low grades and one lonely A in history…proving that it could really be something if it only applied itself.

Matineescore: ★ 1/2 out of ★ ★ ★ ★

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