"Oh, What A Night"...it might have been!

Rating: 6/10 (22 June 2014)

Were the reviews really that bad? I saw the film this afternoon in Manhattan with only 7 other people in the large theatre, and while it was technically more faithful to the stage show (which remains one of the best shows on Broadway after eight and a half years!) than 1982's "Burt & Dolly Go to a Whorehouse", it wasn't nearly as much fun. Despite at least one of the notices I scanned which thanked the film for "basically showing us the musical at a lower price than it would have been on stage" (or words to that effect), it really doesn't - despite preserving many of the musicals touchstones like the characters "breaking the 4th wall" to bring us into the story and following the basic - originally effective - "blemishes and all" plot line.
A good bit of the problem (beyond Mr. Eastwood's heavy handed, dark direction) was simply that film is inherently a more REALISTIC medium than the stage, and showing the events of the show in "realistic" settings (or showing them at all!) rather than the original highly stylized indications drains them of any charm they had originally - the casting of half the leads achieves this in other ways. Yes, we're thrilled that Tony Winning lead John Lloyd Young was allowed to repeat some of his performance - but, like the rest of the group, not singing or acting NEARLY as well as he did on stage - and would that Christian Hoff (the stage Tommy DiVito who founds the singing group which evolves into The Four Seasons) also been brought along. The guy in his role (the only one of the central "group" who had not played his role in some stage version of the show) comes off as a Ricky Nelson-with-a-sneer and impossible to like even before he alienates his peers like a musical Eric Cantor. Their screen Nick Massi is simply embarrassing. One of the genius aspects of the original show was that the stage cast actually sang BETTER than the original group. The same cannot be said of the film crew, although Eastwood appears to try to defend himself against the inevitable charges by blending in some of the group's original performances.
The few noticeable liberties taken by the stage authors who are credited with writing their own screenplay are generally more problems rather than improvements. On the PLUS side, more stage time is given to the daughter Valli lost in an effort to make the loss register more (it doesn't - in part because we never SEE or even hear her supposed musical potential - unmentioned on stage), but all through the film (if one is making comparisons) it's a balancing of pluses and minuses. The group's gay record producer, Bob Crewe, once he settles into the role, like their Joe Pesci, the later film actor who as a kid introduced Bob Gaudio to the group, is a strong positive. The ever more craggy Christopher Walken as Valli's Mob connection, "Gyp," only manages to loosen up his stony stereotype too late in the film in time for the final confrontation with the DiVito character. The negatives ultimately out-weigh the positives - but one can't entirely tell which were the screenwriter's choices and which Eastwood's.
A crucial line "Valli" has near the end is that the most important memory for him was not all the fame or the money but that FIRST moment moment when they found "the sound," standing on a street corner - except that in the film, we never SEE that moment until tossed on as an afterthought LATER! We never see a moment in the entire film (until the end) where the group is performing without instruments and simply harmonizing. It's like someone forgot whose story they were telling!
For ME in any case, *the* high point in the stage musical was the song "Oh What A Night," played against Bob Gaudio's first sexual experience. In the movie, the moment is played against "Walk Like A Man," making a moment which *had* been a simple, universal, celebration of the joy of first time sexual experience into a profoundly offensive homophobic moment - even if not intended as such! Any vestiges of innocence in the scene are removed and "Oh What A Night" is wasted on a too "on the nose" intro to the group's reunion for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and then, in the film's worst miscalculation, the broadly danced "curtain call/credit crawl" which totally violated the spirit and tone of everything else in the film and felt like something staged (by choreographer Sergio Trujillo) for a TV episode of "How I Met Your Mother"!
I did not have a terrible time at the film, but in the end it was such a wasted opportunity. While some on these lists are enjoying the film as much as I wanted to, their enjoyment is not reflected in the empty theatres it is playing to - and in the New York area anyway, the studio seems to have lost faith in the film and pulled all print ads after the first two days of release!
We've had disappointing film versions of a number of long run musicals in recent years since the triumphs of DREAM GIRLS and CHICAGO. Things from the modest success of LES MISERABLES to PHANTOM OF THE OPERA to ROCK OF AGES and even MAMMA MIA (the most enjoyable of the last four) probably didn't harm their source shows - most of which actually run on in their original productions! One hopes this JERSEY BOYS won't either. It is mildly enjoyable on its own terms, but it is far less JERSEY BOYS *really* than any of the other film transfers since ANNIE or ...WHOREHOUSE..., and that's a real pity.