Film Review: Rent (2005)
In late 2005 cinema theatres were flooded with films dealing with what until that time had been euphemistically called “alternative lifestyle”. Their authors were hoping to win Oscars and other prestigious awards on the account of Hollywood and large sections of public suddenly becoming open about promoting LGBT rights. Many of those films, however, became overshadowed by Brokeback Mountain, film that quickly became the most favoured to win Oscars. One of the films in its shadow was Rent, the screen adaptation of the planet-wide popular Broadway musical famous for being the first to deal with issue of AIDS.
Original stage version of Rent was big success, crowned with Tony for Best Musical and Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama. Some of its success was due to tragic publicity made by its talented creator Jonathan Larson succumbing to aortic dissection shortly before the show’s 1996 triumphant premiere. In next years and decades the show was performed in numerous countries, creating a subculture of dedicated fans known as "Rentheads". It was further immortalised by being parodied in one of the musical numbers of Team America.
Larson based the musical's plot partly on Puccini's 1896 opera La bohème, but also partly on his own experiences as a poor and misunderstood artist. His alter ego in the film is Mark Cohen (played by Anthony Rapp), a documentary filmmaker whose girlfriend Maureen (played by Idina Menzel) has left him for a black lesbian lawyer, Joanne Jefferson (played by Tracie Thoms). Mark's roommate Roger (played by Adam Pascal) is an unsuccessful rock musician who falls in love with his neighbor – stripper Mimi Marquez (played by Rosario Dawson). This merry band also includes gay street philosopher Collins (playe by Jesse L. Martin), who begins a relationship with drag queen Angel Dumont Schunard (played by Wilson Germaine Heredia). The film begins at the end of 1989 and follows their lives for a year as they face poverty and the fact that some of them, because of being HIV positive, time is running out.
To the dismay of many "Rentheads", the film adaptation failed to repeat the success of original stage version. It was greeted with notable lack of enthusiasm among the critics and didn’t get any major award nomination.
This failure has least to do with the cast, which is, with notable exceptions of Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms, the same as in original 1996 stage version. Chris Columbus has done a solid job as director, but despite all his talent, he could not resolve the problem that often arises in film adaptations of popular books or musicals. Larson's work, which is often cited as being truly effective only on stage, will leave viewers cold and indifferent when viewed on screen.
Another problem for the film is in AIDS – which was such an important backdrop for the plot – nowadays considered smaller and more manageable problem than it was for people in the bohemian circles of New York City in the 1980s. However, Rent suffers most from the fact that the film, unlike the stage production, more starkly highlights the one-dimensionality and unconvincing nature of certain characters, making them look more like walking clichés than flesh-and-blood people. Larson had also burdened them with poor dialogue, and, songs, that at least some cases, sound very forgettable.
Rent is a film that feels like a missed opportunity – a watered-down adaptation that loses sight of the very things that made its stage counterpart so revolutionary.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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