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A few weeks ago, my friend Garth asked me why the film version of Rent was coming out now, nearly ten years after it premiered on Broadway and took the musical theater world by storm. I responded with one word, "Chicago." The box-office and Oscar success of that stage-to-film transplant made producers and studios eager to "discover" other popular musicals that they might mine for fortune and acclaim. Given Rent's cachet and cult following, it was an obvious choice.

I wasn't a huge fan of the movie version of Chicago. The story and acting were entertaining, but the decision to cast actors who couldn't dance or sing was the worst form of bowdlerization. Bob Fosse is still spinning in his grave. Rent doesn't have that problem. In fact, almost all of the film's actors starred in the original Broadway production of Rent. This includes Taye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin, and Anthony Rapp, who have gone on to major film and television success.

The story revolves around the year in the lives of eight good friends, four of whom are suffering from AIDS. The year is 1990, when AIDS was practically a death sentence, but they're not ready to give up yet. Unfortunately, AIDS is only one of their many problems. Their artistic endeavors haven't quite panned out, they're living in a neighborhood where drug dealers prowl the streets, and they don't have the money to pay either the rent or the heat. Still, they have each other, at least when they're not breaking up with each other over some perceived slight. Yes, there's a lot of drama. Holding everything together is Angel (note the name!), a transvestite hooker (played by Wilson Jermaine Heredia) who might be the kindest, gentlest person in America.

Transferring a musical to the big screen is always a tricky operation. The big emotions and melodrama that work in a huge theater can appear out of place and forced on film. Playing to the back of the house is part of acting on the stage, but that doesn't work in a medium of close ups and editing. It's also different for the audience. When you're sitting thirty feet from an actor who's pouring out his heart, you feel a stronger connection to the material and are willing to overlook the occasional awkward moment that might arise. We respond differently, however, to a movie where the director can shoot a dozen takes and pick the best one.

To make up for what's lost in the transition to film, director Chris Columbus has fallen back on the cinematic device of camera movement. I know it's customary among movie critics to reflexively criticize Columbus, who's made such critic-proof movies as Home Alone I and _II_ and Mrs. Doubtfire. So I didn't want to be one of those people who shoot darts at the easy target. But, gosh, Columbus really is a hack. I've never seen crane and tracking shots appear so lifeless and arbitrary, and there's hardly a single graceful composition in the film. Even the title song, which features eviction notices on fire falling through the air (a dynamite visual possibility), is ruined by the random and repetitive camera moving up and down, up and down.

Still, this isn't Chicago, which has a foundation of complicated choreography. There, Rob Marshall's pedestrian direction was an especially poor fit with the material. Rent, on the other hand, is mostly about characters who sing about their problems. Yet, that gets tiring after a while. In one particularly fatuous scene, a woman who's just performed a commitment ceremony with her lesbian lover starts flirting with another woman at the reception. When she's called on her actions, she responds with the song "Take Me [for what I am] or Leave Me." Other characters aren't quite as bad as that, but there's still a defiant selfish streak that runs through the story. And because these people are so self-absorbed, I just stopped caring after a while. Which is a problem, given that characters is all Rent has.

In the last several days, I've asked a number of  _Rent_ fans what they like about the musical. Without hesitating, they all mention the music, a fact I find mystifying. I'm sure the derivative, early '90s pop-rock bombast works better on the stage than it does on the screen, but still. I mean, Journey and REO Speedwagon would've been embarrassed to have their names attached to some of these tunes. And just because Rent came along when Broadway was drowning in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh productions doesn't mean we should give these faux rock tunes a pass ten years later. Yeah, there are a few memorable songs, especially the great ensemble work "Seasons of Love" and the cheeky "Tango Maureen," but so many of them are reminiscent of bland MOR material that was already dated in the mid-'90s. And when Adam Pascal slips into his imitation of Joe Cocker (which is often), well the less said about that the better.

My biggest problem with Rent, though, is its politics of narcissism. While I'm sure that playwright Jonathan Larson and his legion of admirers imagine the musical's message to be transgressive and revolutionary, it's merely one long howl that the Me decade of the '70s got interrupted by the advent of AIDS. The title song takes a stand that children of privileged parents shouldn't have to pay "last year's rent" as long as they're pretending to be artists (don't get me started on the artistic abilities of these layabouts). "La vie Boheme," a huge production number, is a celebration of doing whatever you want and a finger to anyone who tells you otherwise. The fact that Susan Sontag and Vaclav Havel are invoked in this litany to "Mucho Masturbation and No Shame" shows how politically naive Larson is. Even worse, though, are the musical's ideas about what political action might actually look like. The first half of the film builds to a protest performance that supposedly has wealthy developers and police quaking in their shoes. But the protest plays like a parody of performance art and climaxes with a crowd jumping up and down and mooing like cows. Literally. I am not making this up. It's not art, it's not politics, it's not revolution, it's just stupid. 

by J. Robert Parks