Eastwood misfires with weak characterizations and clichéd dialog

Rating: 5/10 (10 December 2014)

Jersey Boys is the latest film to come off the Clint Eastwood production line. Based on the Broadway musical the film is the story of four young men who would eventually go onto become The Four Seasons, one of the central doo-wop groups of the sixties. The film charts their rise from petty thievery in New Jersey to chart domination and so-on to the various fall outs that usually raise their head in such music biopics.
I say music biopic, but Jersey Boys gets lost in a chasm between being a music biopic and a musical. It has strong elements of both yet doesn't know which it wants to be. And this is one of Jersey Boys' many, many flaws.
The film contains the same four actors as the Broadway musical. Also, the screenplay was written by the same writers as the Broadway musical. You get the feeling they didn't know which they were going for, musical or biopic. I definitely didn't.
The first half hour or so introduces us to the two key characters, Frankie Valli (John Loyd Young) and Tommy DiVito, (Vincent Piazza) both young musicians trying to make it out of the 'neighborhood' and a supposed life of petty crime.
There are a few sequences around this time bizarrely involving a character that is supposed to be the young Joe Pesci, which is fair enough because apparently the Four Seasons did in fact know Pesci. What is not fair enough is the 'how am I funny?' reference shamelessly thrown in. As well as the fact that he's played as Pesci's persona in Goodfellas/Casino, not as a young Pesci himself. The whole thing is just peculiar.
Eastwood uses a piece to camera story telling technique whereby each of the four protagonists takes turns speaking directly to the audience and talking them through the plot in the style of Ferris Buelar's Day Off and Alfie and surely deriving from the play too. In all fairness we probably need the explanations to catch exactly what is supposed to be going on. But they're handled so poorly it just takes us totally out of any sense of illusion we might have had. Specifically look out for such an example where bassist Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) attempts one of these monologues whilst he is supposed to be in the middle of a stage performance. Awful stuff.
Of the characters that the story revolves around the only one that appears to matter, for the first third of the film anyway, is Tommy DiVito. It appears to be his story; and he is unbearable. Tommy is a boring stereotype of the typical Italian–American mob underling and his character is insufferable. In each scene we hear him before we see him, barking a threat or applying tacky charm. It's only ever one of the two. His testosterone and ego are so over the top that I found him hilarious. He is a ridiculous and unbelievable character. Frankie Valli, to my eye, is given nothing; his character is not explored in any way until about two-thirds into the film, when there is an attempt made to give him some sort of back story regarding a relationship with his daughter. It seems a sub plot squeezed in because it needed to be and because the film makers realized how little his character is explored. It's haphazardly handled and neatly tied up before you know what's happening. However even if this aspect of the film had been handled well and unraveled in a way so that the audience could appreciate would was happening it's still at too late a stage to care about the guy or even want to get to know him.
The script seems disjointed and the dialogue weak. There's far too much time spent on the four protagonists attempts to 'make it' and again this all revolves around the Tommy DiVito character. The dialogue is filled with clichés to such a point that a lot of lines spoken by the characters sound as if they were the first thing that came into the writers head.
The cinematography for me seemed dull and appeared to give the film a somewhat flat and cold feeling. It's strange, when you notice cinematography it's usually because it's good, rich and vibrant or even stark, and cool. But on this occasion I noticed the cinematography because it seemed so washed out and plain. The photography on the film seemed to be trying to imitate the lighting on a Broadway show. Leave one to one and the other to the other would be my thinking.
It's meant to be a fairly light-hearted piece by what I can judge. That could be its only defense. That it's not meant to be taken too seriously. But even still, the weak characterizations and the clichéd dialogue is fairly unforgivable.