The Gospel According To Barry, Robin, Maurice & John

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2005)

"I got the wings of heaven on my shoes/I'm a dancin' man, and I just can't lose..." More people know "Saturday Night Fever" for its soundtrack than the movie. Having been one of them, I can speak to how that can skew things negatively seeing the film for the first time. The music of "Saturday Night Fever" is shimmering, accessible disco music of high sophistication, an aural cocoon of positive vibes. The movie, by contrast, is harsh, nasty, vulgar, and dark.
Tony Manero, a kid of good instincts but mediocre intelligence, lives a life of quiet desperation, hanging around his low-life buddies and trolling after sex and various illicit thrills. He blows his small weekly wages for a brief spark of the divine, music that makes him a god, or at least an idol, to the others who come to his temple. "Can I wipe your forehead?" a woman asks, and as she does so it reminds one a little of Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet.
Calling "Saturday Night Fever" a religious film feels like a stretch. If anything, the attitude of the film is fairly atheistic, especially in the way it mocks the piety of Tony's mother and showcases the fall of his brother the priest. Yet "Saturday Night Fever" is completely concerned with the question of transcendence, man's desire to achieve it and his inability to do so, using the grimy streets of Brooklyn as the reality and the music of the Bee Gees and other artists as the fantasy. The result is a cultural touchstone.
The music may be the best part of the film, but it works in unison with the narrative, right from the opening when a God's-eye view of Brooklyn descending from the clouds to the train tracks suddenly picks up "Staying Alive" in midbeat. When we first see Tony, in a brilliant sequence that merely involves him toting a paint can, the song's lyrics are already telling us his sad story, that this tough, chiseled character is struggling to stay alive, "going nowhere" in a big city with no one to help him. Bee Gees Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb almost merit co-screen writing credit, as they set a mood director John Badham and writer Norman Wexler weave throughout the film.
People who complain SNF is foul have a point; in isolation the soundtrack does nothing to prepare you for the language, casual sex, and racism presented matter-of-factly on screen. To me, it points again to the question of religion, and what people have if they don't have God. The answer, it seems, is music, and nothing else. It's either one of the most nihilistic or pro-religious messages ever put on screen. The fact I have no idea which it is makes it more interesting to me.
Another reason the film is so very good is John Travolta's breakout performance in the lead role. People talk about his dancing, and he's amazing especially when the floor opens up and lets him do a solo turn to "You Should Be Dancing." But his best dancing comes when he's acting. One moment his character is nobly refusing a prize he knows he didn't deserve. The next, he's assaulting a woman because he knows she doesn't want to have sex with him. The dark undercurrents with which Travolta imbues his character make such transitions not only believable but essential to the story.
I'm not completely sold on "Saturday Night Fever." The family scenes are annoyingly one-dimensional, for example. Like another bleak, pathbreaking film featuring a gang of toughs, "The Wild Bunch," it's a film I respect more than enjoy.
But there's a lot of color and depth here. Those who say otherwise aren't watching it with both eyes open. I also love the performance of Karen Lynn Gorney, who provides pathos and humor as Travolta's dance partner Stephanie whose aspirations of glory exceed even his, even if she can't pronounce words like "interesting." The scene of the two of them in the coffee shop is hilarious.
A lot of the film isn't, though. It's quite bleak. But that's the strange source of its power, that and the music. Like its protagonist, "Saturday Night Fever" is a film that doesn't stand still.