A sad echo of a great genre

Rating: 3/10 (5 January 2017)

I see the universal adulation this film has had, and there's much to admire. To my ears, though, it's sadly lacking in the one key element every musical needs: great songs. With the possible exception of "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)," there's not a memorable tune or soaring line to be found. It doesn't help that neither of the two leads has a strong singing voice, and as for dancing -- the steps are limited, and even within that scope, not particularly well-executed. Dancing, in a musical, has to be over-the-top good to carry the energy of the film.
But the worst thing, really, is the lack of structure. Musicals are selective in the parts of the story that they take to build the three-act structure; the characters have to be established before we can care about them, have to face an obstacle so that we care more, and have to overcome it or die trying, at which point the big numbers come out. Here, we start with a big number -- the dance on the LA freeway -- but there's no reason for dancing as of yet. The love- not-at-first-sight motif is a good old one, but here it's so choppily presented that we're not sure whether we should care or not. It could be a slow-motion screwball comedy, or a musical revue punctuated by little life-dramas -- but to be a musical it must soar. This one is leaden, forced, and was painful for me to watch, despite much admirable production work and cinematography.
After I got home, I watched "Singin' in the Rain" as an antidote, and felt much better. It's not impossible to revive the moribund musical genre -- it was done in 1981 with Pennies from Heaven, and several times over by Baz Luhrmann, who even managed to make some of his non- professional singing stars sound pretty darn good (see Moulin Rouge). But despite all the hype, this film, to me, felt like seeing an old friend imperfectly resurrected from the grave, with none of the old lively exuberance for which -- once upon a time -- he was known the world over.