Jersey Boys (2014)

Clint Eastwood's Jersey Boys: From Broadway Blockbuster to Boilerplate Biopic

The road from stage to screen is almost always paved with good, although still commercial, intentions. Cinema, with its countless manners of reaching to an audience, will always be the best medium to reach the masses. Good intentions notwithstanding, films based on stage plays, more specifically musicales, are often riddled with issues on adaptation.

Directors tasked to adapt musicales to movies are often faced with the dilemma of translating elements specific to the stage to cinematic language, without sacrificing the charms that made the original material successful and popular enough to be optioned. Certain decisions often lead to disastrous results.

Chris Columbus’ take on Jonathan Larson’s Rent (2005) had the Harry Potter-director’s trademark Hollywood gloss and naiveté bastardize the rare bleakness of the material. Joel Schumacher’s version of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera (2004) concentrated more on the original play’s kitsch and aplomb rather than its world-famous musicality.

Clint Eastwood, in adapting Tony Award-winning Jersey Boys, had the good sense of understanding that the material he is faced with has all the makings of the traditional Hollywood biopic. Its being a musicale is nothing more than a stunt for better Broadway showmanship. Eastwood, whose films are often peppered with stirring heft, is clearly more interested in the story of Frankie Valli and his crew, which has themes and motivations that are right along his alley.

The narrative arc is all too familiar. Frankie, played by John Lloyd Young who is reprising the role from the musicale’s debut in Broadway, is a barber’s assistant with a uniquely beautiful shrill singing voice. With pals Tommy de Vito and Nick Massi, played by Vincent Piazza and Michael Lomenda respectively, Frankie spends most of his free time either breaking the law or breaking ladies’ hearts with his distinctive crooning.

It is only when composer Bob Gaudio, played by Erich Bergen, came into the group that things start to pick up for the group. The Four Seasons is then formed. They get the recording contract they aspired for, with a collection of hits under their belt. However, as with most American rags-to-riches, obscurity-to-fame tales, everything is undone by clashing egos and inevitable vices.

The theater elements of the source material that remain, like the characters breaking the fourth wall to narrate their internal struggles or the upbeat curtain call where close-ups of the actors replace individual bows, serve the purpose of reminding the audience of the film’s roots. They also reveal that very rare opportunity where Eastwood, rigid and straightforward to a fault, attempts at humor and experimentation.

Eastwood, who is famous first as an actor before delving into directing with Play Misty With Me (1971), is in fact also a very capable musician. He composed the scores for most of his recent films, like Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006). In all of his films, music, although scarce and subtle, is always impeccably placed to draw out the emotions he requires from his viewers.

It is no different with Jersey Boys. Although Eastwood mostly does away with the musicale’s need to be constantly in a singsong state, he still manages to incorporate to make essential the various songs of the Four Seasons and Franki Valli in either moving the narrative or adding emotional weight to the scenes. A lot of the film’s dull intervals are salvaged with music.

Forget Broadway for a couple of hours. Let Eastwood do what he’s best at doing, which is to lace familiar stories with a certain kind of elegance that Hollywood has forgotten nowadays. Eastwood’s decision to filter out most of the theater elements from the material, all for the sake of being conventionally cinematic, sort of pays off.

Jersey Boys is a safe endeavor. It fulfils its intent of telling the musicale’s story to a much wider audience, although obviously with less pageantry and gaiety. That said, Jersey Boys suffers from too much earnestness, too much gravity, and too little irreverence, the same ailments that drive most biopics about musicians to eventual obscurity. Eastwood, without the benefit of the bells and whistles most musicales provide, seems to be powerless to the allure of churning out just another boilerplate drama.

(First published in Rappler.)

Gran Torino (2008)

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

In Sergio Leone's invaluable masterpiece The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), a very young Clint Eastwood plays an unnamed cowboy (popularly known as the Man with No Name), who in his pursuit for hidden treasure, involuntarily gets involved in the ongoing Civil War. In one scene, he witnesses firsthand the effects of war as he rides by fallen soldiers struggling to stay alive amidst mortal wounds and severe despair. Through death and suffering, Eastwood's unnamed cowboy sheds his familiar indifference to partially reveal his affiliation with humanity. A firsthand experience with the human condition pushes him out of the comfort of his chosen neutrality; and all at once, witnesses the repercussions of humanity in its most depraved. Whether or not the encounter causes a dent on a soul that has already been rendered callous by violence is out of the film's range. The Man with No Name rides into the sunset wealthier from the spoils of his adventure, and we can only guess whether he took with him the weight of his wary world.

More than four decades later, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran whose wartime experiences has turned him into a cynical fossil of a man. The inescapable internal and external hell that Walt struggles with seems to be the apt representative of the grim twilight of all of his famous onscreen personas' lives: The Man With No Name of Leone's popular spaghetti westerns, Inspector Harry Callahan of Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and its many sequels and offshoots, Bill Munny of Unforgiven (Eastwood, 1992), and to a certain degree, Franky Dunn of Million Dollar Baby (Eastwood, 2004), who share with Walt the edgy perspective in life would normally lead to a lifetime of repressed remorse, lest callousness has crept into the core of their souls to the point that redemption is no longer an option. Walt is observably, an embattled soul who in his old age, is still painfully struggling with the baggage created from a lifetime of accumulated and accumulating sins. It seems that there can be no redemption for Walt; yet the miracle of Eastwood's filmmaking in Gran Torino (which to my mind is one of Eastwood's better films in his career as a director and undoubtedly his best film in the past decade) is to seamlessly convince his audience of Walt's slow yet deliberate turnaround.

The film opens during the wake of Walt's recently deceased wife. His children, their wives, their sons and daughters, attend the ceremony in deference to mere blood relationship. The strain that defines the relationship between Walt and his family is more than apparent: Walt is constantly irritated by the antics of his grandchildren (he silently growls when he catches his grandsons play with his medal of honor; a more prominent though silent growl is expressed when his granddaughter is leading him to give his beloved memorabilia); and the latter repay his irritation with discomfort when in his presence; Walt is disappointed at his son for driving a Japanese-made car, and dismisses him and his wife from his house when they suggested on his birthday that he relocate to a retirement home. Walt is obviously living in a pit. He has no real relationship with anyone, especially after the death of his wife. His health is deteriorating. He is slowly being cornered in a neighborhood where he is obsolete and immaterial.

Walt is a caricature of classic American arrogance: mouthing racist mantras as he sees his formerly White neighborhood fill up with immigrants; embarrassing the novice parish priest as the latter convinces him to go into confession, lecturing the young priest on life and death based on his experiences; exchanging insults with the local barber, supposedly in good and friendly humor. The face of the America he has lived in, loved, and killed for is rapidly changing. His insistence on the America he knew has stunted his life, which primarily consists of him sulking in his front porch while drowning himself in beer or admiring his one treasure, his vintage Gran Torino. In a twist of fate, the Gran Torino, the one thing that represents his ideal America, becomes the spark that pushes him to befriend Thao (Bee Vang), his Hmong neighbor who he catches one night attempting to steal his car as part of the initiation rites for a gang he was coerced to join, and his family.

Absent from Gran Torino is the typical heavy-handedness and seriousness that often plagues Eastwood's directorial efforts. Eastwood treats the material with an irreverence that is refreshing and most surprisingly, quite fun. The story evolves from light and often comedic sketches that depict Walt's persistent intolerance (with Eastwood's over-the-top yet undeniably apt portrayal limited to growls, grimaces, and guttural utterances of profanities and indecent remarks) to a highly emotional morality play, where Walt, with all his ethical inadequacies, is forced to referee a delicate situation that he finds himself in the center of. The sudden gravity that develops midway through the film is unforced; instead, it lures the audience into an emotional involvement with the affairs of Walt, not totally different from the one achieved through the machinations of daytime soap, that escalates in a climactic scene that is resolved by Walt's mental prestidigitation that completes his redemption, something often wished for but hardly achieved by most of cinema's morally weathered figures.

Changeling (2008)

Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)

Changeling is Clint Eastwood's middling account of the struggles of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mom who loses her son (Gattlin Griffith) and when the L. A. police reunited her with a different boy, protests and because of that, becomes hapless victim of the embattled police force's determination to salvage whatever integrity and reputation it has left under the inept and corrupt leadership of Chief Davis (Colm Feore). The film has the same somber and sober tone of Eastwood's post-Unforgiven (1999) Oscar baits (Mystic River (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)), where the pessimistic core dressed in multi-million dollar gloss of the films is often mistaken as aesthetic sophistication and thematic depth, thus garnering much popular and critical acclaim for what basically is heavy-handed humdrum.

Undoubtedly, like most of Eastwood's more recent features, Changeling is visually wonderful. Cinematographer Tom Stern paints this unideal Los Angeles with muted hues that seemingly allude to the moral and political condition of that era: hazy, fading, paling. 1920's-Los Angeles is impressively recreated, from the rows of suburban homes that house the newly affluent middle class to the decrepit abandoned farm in the outskirts of the city that becomes the setting of the horrendous massacre which is the core of the narrative. Populating these structures and edifices are citizens and transients who are occupied by their respective little businesses involving family and employment. The atmosphere of moral and political disarray is conveniently hidden by the bright Californian sun, until an impetus for its timely revelation occurs.

The film primarily concerns itself with Christine's own little entanglements which quickly transformed into the gargantuan task, the aforementioned impetus, of defeating the seemingly indestructible authority, something which she was volunteered for not by her own choosing but by fate and the repercussions of living in a corrupted city. J. Michael Straczynski, in his screenplay, is adamantly straightforward in forwarding the virtues of his headstrong heroine, but in so doing, branches into a myriad of unwieldy subplots and introduces a bevy of mono-dimensional side characters, including Rev. Gustav Briegleb (played with predictably boring enthusiasm by John Malkovich), a Presbyterian minister whose consistently forceful verbal attacks against the police and mental manipulation of Christine feels obnoxiously monomaniacal, Captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), the bad cop whose quintessential grimaces leave nothing to the imagination, and Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner), the serial killer whose attempts at moral and psychological vagueness is more unconvincing than unsettling.

Eastwood's usually guileless and elegant storytelling seems inappropriate for Straczynski's pulpy material. There is a suspect air of reverence, facilitated by Straczynski's over-respectful tribute to his obscure protagonist, Eastwood's consistently competent although unremarkable direction, and Jolie's uncharacteristically quiet but effective turn as the perpetually suffering Christine Collins, that permeates throughout the film. It is an air of reverence that is particularly suffocating and this film, from its introduction of depicting Christine as timid yet industrious single mother (we see Christine at her workplace, well-loved, responsible, and diligently skating around her workplace before returning home to tend to her son) to the emotional trials she patiently goes through, delivers in unrelenting doses.

Changeling is a masterpiece to stubborn Eastwood-followers, gullible feminists, and connoisseurs of high melodrama and manipulative weepers. I also suspect fans of Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), and Manderlay (2005), all of which depict women suffering through very cruel twists of fate, would be comfortable seeing Jolie bullied by the police into accepting a stranger as his son, dragged into the loony bin, and stripped and washed like filthy cattle, among others. To present-day cynics, or even those of us who have admired the simplicity of Eastwood's storytelling, Changeling is a disappointment that borders on being torture.

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Letters From Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

I was quite surprised to have immensely liked Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima. I've heard all the praises the film has received, and I thought it would be Mystic River (2003) all over again --- overly praised film but heavy handed to the point of tedium. My dislike for Letters From Iwo Jima's companion piece Flags of Our Fathers (2006) also led me to expect utter disappointment. Flags of Our Fathers was all over the place --- it was narratively unstructured, sentimentally grating, and extremely melodramatic. However, after seeing Letters From Iwo Jima, I was completely dumbfounded. I never thought Eastwood has the capability, or even the knowledgeable restraint to create such a film. Letters From Iwo Jima is both poignant and celebratory. It dismantles the importance of warfare by celebrating the value of humanity; and all this is seen from the point of view of the conceived enemy of the Pacific War, the Japanese.

Iris Yamashita's screenplay disposes of the time jumping narrative structure of Flags of Our Fathers. Instead, she begins her tale with the arrival of American-schooled general Kuribiyashi (Ken Watanabe) to Iwo Jima to see through the military affairs of the island until the expected attack of American troops. Flashbacks are utilized to give a human face to the Japanese troops; Eastwood segues voice-overs of these troops reading their letters to the flashbacks --- we see these soldiers years before they were commissioned to sacrifice their lives for their country. It's not an uncommon device, but in Eastwood's hands, these flashbacks urge you to immediately identify with these soldiers, who through the years have been described as war-hungry conquerors, or mindless suicidal drones of an inutile empire.

What surprises me the most with Letters From Iwo Jima is how Eastwood successfully fleshed out the theme of identity through the feature. It's a war pic --- two great nations forced into war with Iwo Jima as the touted final battleground. Ordinarily, a war pic would force you to distinguish hero from villain, winner from loser, Japanese from American, yet what Eastwood does is to give each player in the war their individual stories and with that, transform his war pic into a struggle for these individuals to seek out an identifying factor with the rest of humanity. These soldiers, forced from their homes and families, have suddenly found themselves in a situation wherein they juggle their multiple roles in life --- husband, soldier, citizen, baker --- in the end, the only thing remaining from what feels like a melting pot of jarring roles, is the fact that they are human beings, similar to the captured American soldier who through his letter is revealed to be a loving son to a worried mother, similar to the lowly soldier who becomes entrapped in a mutiny within the Japanese army, similar to the Kuribiyashi who finds himself in a situation wherein he'll be fighting against his friends.

It's a classy film. I didn't understand why Eastwood bleached out the colors from Flags of Our Fathers --- the result was a drab and dreary film. Here, Eastwood similarly uses the same technique, but with vastly different results. There's a elegiac quality to the visuals. Some of the scenes look like something John Ford would make --- close up of faces backgrounded by an empty sky, shadows of men in desolate vistas. It's extremely beautiful --- and the bleaching out makes an illusion of a black and white feature, enunciating the little gestures, the folds and wrinkles of troubled faces, the contemplative moments wherein almost nothing or something utterly mundane happens.

This is the only Eastwood film I can honestly say that I loved. It's the only Eastwood film that I can call cinematic. It is quiet, observant, focused, and graciously plotted. The film aches with a thoughtful power that urges you to just dwell in these very human experiences that unfold onscreen. I must admit, I am deeply impressed.

Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Joe Rosenthal's photograph of six soldiers struggling to raise an American flag atop the highest peak of Iwo Jima has become an indelible image of American heroism. The photograph has adorned stamps, paintings, sculptures, and has become the point of exploration for Clint Eastwood in his latest feature Flags of Our Fathers. Adapted from the non-fiction book written by James Bradley (son of one of the trio heroes of Iwo Jima), Flags of Our Fathers is an engaging examination of heroism within and without the battlefields of the Pacific War. As with almost all Eastwood films, the treatment feels heavy-handed and the result, somewhat depressing. Yet, the magnitude of Eastwood's vision, his astounding tinkering with 21st century war filmmaking (complete with CGI vistas of oceans populated with ships and tanks) keeps the pic from drowning in its unsavory sentimentalism.

Eastwood's film is boggled by a non-straightforward narrative. He juggles a narrative that opens with a present-day interview handled by James Bradley (played by Tom McCarthy), which gives way to the happenings during the Iwo Jima heroes' campaigning for war bonds. Flashbacks of the actual battles intersect sequences. The result is somewhat confusing, especially during the opening sequences wherein Eastwood barrages his audience's senses with a number of characters typical to the war genre. It picks up midway when Eastwood has started to drape the pic with his typical melodrama and histrionics; somewhat washed tastefully by a healthy dose of Saving Private Ryan-type of war pic realism.

Flags of Our Fathers is probably Eastwood's visually richest film. Tom Stern, who was also director of photography of Eastwood's last two films, washes out the color from Eastwood's canvas. At times, the film looks black and white --- which is helpful since it mutes the violent moments of the film; giving a richness or depth to the warfare rather than a mere romp at excessive morbidity. The desaturated photography also aids Eastwood's period scenes.

I do have problems with the film, some very serious ones. The pic is grounded on Doc Bradley (Ryan Philippe), who when compared to his companions, is a bit of a downer. Philippe doesn't help much; his baby-face features do not add interest on the character whose temperate and goody-goody nature blurs Eastwood's discussions on heroism and adds questionability to the plausibility of the feature. More interesting are Bradley's companions. Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) is the lime-light hogging pretender; his exact opposite is Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) who rejects the call of sensationalism as he sees himself unfit for heroic status. Eastwood overhandles Hayes' histrionics, and turns Gagnon and his girlfriend propaganda caricatures; Bradley remains to be the uninteresting middle ground who, when not fighting it out or rescuing injured soldiers, is quite a bore.

The film becomes preachy as it reaches its finale. Screenwriters Paul Haggis and William Broyles, Jr. take center stage with a wordy and rather unflattering conclusion to Eastwood's effort (especially the brilliantly staged warfare scenes). The ending basically encapsulates the entire Iwo Jima experience, the rabid propaganda-gathering, Hayes' subsequent downfall with alcoholism, Gagnon's fading away to obscurity, into a Hallmark card-type sugary concoction. Eastwood further adds schmaltz with his minimalist musical score.