Never give an icon an even break

Rating: 6/10 (12 August 2010)

"Saturday Night Fever" has become synonymous with disco's brief heyday, if someone knows just three things about disco, chances are that John Travolta dancing on the colored-lighting disco floor is one of them. This is hands down the iconic disco movie, and it will always have value as a time capsule both into disco culture itself and one of the biggest movies of that time period.
As a movie, though, it isn't quite a classic for anything but its iconic pop culture status. We meet Travolta's Tony Manero, a working-class Italian-American with a passion for dancing, who initially seems okay with his lifestyle working in a hardware store in the old neighborhood and being the king of his ethnic neighborhood's local disco, as well as ringleader of a group of friends who obviously idolize him.
Everything starts to unravel when he meets Stephanie, a dancing queen who is trying to make it out of the old neighborhood and succeed in Manhattan which, as the characters remark, seems like a different world even though it's just across the river. Stephanie turns Tony's world on its head by using him as a dancing partner only and refusing him romance, which was how Tony was used to treating women prior to meeting Stephanie. Smitten, Tony starts to have doubts about his lifestyle, and grows annoyed with his job, his family and his friends.
The movie has a few problems. It's almost a movie about someone becoming disillusioned with disco, which is a strange plot direction for a movie called "Saturday Night Fever". For a movie that's remembered as a high note of disco culture, it's actually pretty lukewarm on the whole thing and almost downplays any potential excitement the characters might be feeling, any "fever", rather than trying to highlight it.
Side-stories are awkwardly developed - Tony's brother quits the priesthood and expresses his crisis of faith, a clear prelude to Tony's own problems, but it just didn't seem to have been handled particularly well, Tony doesn't even seem to care particularly much when it happens. What's more, someone losing their faith in god is the opening act to someone losing their faith in disco? It's rather shallow when you deconstruct it. Aside from his brother, Tony's family and friends never even move past being one-dimensional, limiting any emotional impact the movie might have.
Although they deal with different time periods and cultures, I think an apt comparison here is "American Graffiti", which was made within a few years and dealt with the same general topic of post-high school teenagers trying to figure out their future amid a hang-out culture. "American Graffiti" offered much more depth and genuinely interesting characters and situations, highlighting the areas where "Saturday Night Fever" falls short.
This isn't to say "Saturday Night Fever" is a bad movie. Travolta's acting is iconic and memorable, the choreography is fun, the music, sets and costumes obviously have a lot of nostalgic appeal, and the story isn't bad or void of meaning, it just doesn't rise to the level of great storytelling. And, as opposed to many movies about a specific culture or lifestyle, everyone I've talked to who "was there" agrees that this movie is pretty accurate in its depiction of the northeast's disco culture in the late 1970s.
It's a good time capsule, but unfortunately falls short of being a great movie.