So beautiful and so full of empathy

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2015)

One more film Clint Eastwood dedicates to a musical group he must have liked when he was younger, a group that had some fame in the 1960s and even beyond, Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons.
The music is good but it could not be considered as outstanding if Frankie Valli had not been part of them, had not been the lead singer. Today we would say he was a countertenor, though that sounds too operatic, so we could say he was a falsetto voice and as such, as a radio announcer said, is he a man, is he a boy, or is she a girl in disguise? Who knows and who cares? A voice of that type was of course rare in those days and he knew how to go down to his tenor voice from time to time.
But it is a shame this voice was not worked upon more and was more or less kept unkempt, un-worked, a vocal waste land, a raw voice, beautiful but raw, unsmooth. So it is most of the time more surprising than engulfing and elevating as countertenors know out to be. But of course we are in the rock garden of wonders and as such it is beautiful and fascinating.
The interest though of the film is not only that voice but the story, the plot even, how a group managed to be born, to grow, to reach fame and then to disband and the survivors managed to have a personal career in their turn, and in the end they revive the group for the final lap in their life and career. The group is dominated, haunted, enslaved by Tommy deVito who is a very difficult character since he is authoritarian, capricious and extremely self centered if not egotistic. He makes everyone tense and even defensive and at the same time he gets into some financial debt with the mafia and the debt goes up and up and is finally solved when it reaches 162,000 dollars.
But that is too much for most of the members of the quartet. So Tommy walks out, Nick walks out and Frankie remains alone with his song writer Bob Gaudio and they make it together, a real successful career though life is not easy for Frankie.
Frankie gets into trouble with his wife he hardly sees anyway since he is on the road all the time. Their daughter has reached an age when she needs some authority figure and her mother cannot cope. This ends badly because a young teenager cannot stay in one place more than five minutes. But Frankie seems to have the energy to transform any hardship into inspiration and his song writer is patient enough to be able to reach out and bring the love song Frankie needs to bury his daughter in his heart and the love song becomes the most beautiful requiem, dirge or tenebrae that hits the ceiling at once because of the feeling Frankie invests in his singing.
A beautiful film about these singers, but also about the hard life of creative musicians and artists who often have to sacrifice their own private and personal life or have very patient and dedicated partners. The rest is plain creativity, inspiration and love, desperate and divine love for your art.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU