A red state film, Rent ain't.
New York gays? With AIDS? Singing and dancing?
Imagine packed Memphis multiplexes. Sold-out Sioux City cineplexes. Calls from the White House booker for in-flight entertainment aboard Air Force One.
Calculate the odds against a box-office bonanza between the coasts. Then triple them.
But as an ode to America's outsiders, the ultimate blue-state nose-thumbers of red-state rigidity—gay, lesbian, transvestite (even straight) bohemian-artist pals in New York's East Village clinging to each other while grappling with poverty, love, illness and death at the close of the AIDS-plagued '80s—Rent is a fiercely original film. Even if it's based on a classic encased in amber: Puccini's La Boheme. Echoing one of its defiantly ebullient songs, Rent insists you either "Take Me Or Leave Me."
I took it. But it wasn't always easy.
You'll need something familiar to hang onto while riding this wiggy whirlybird. And if you've seen the roughly five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred TV trailers, you know that's actually five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred minutes, the catchy, recurring refrain from "Seasons of Love," the acclaimed stage musical-turned-movie's signature song, and the total in a year, during which this frenetic film unfolds.
Keep it in your head. It's like a life raft through this movie's dense soundscape of spoken lines flaring into sung dialogue rolling into solo and ensemble songs with few easy melodic hooks. That's the appeal of a rock-operatic frenzy (think: The Who's Tommy), so know what you're in for.
There are nearly five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred reasons to flat-out love, hate or love/hate Rent, even for moviegoers willing to accept characters breaking into tuneful expression. It'll likely polarize audiences, not just ideologically and politically but cinematically. With its between-scene blackouts and moments of relative realism amid New York grit and grime abruptly U-turning into singsong sequences (West Side Story, anyone?), this is one vigorously shaken snow globe of a movie, as beautiful as it is chaotic.
The narrative thread weaving this close, unconventional clan together begins with roommates Roger and Mark. Roger, an aspiring filmmaker trying to maintain his art without conceding to commerce, has lost his self-indulgent, performance-artist girlfriend, Maureen, who left him for a jealousy-prone lawyer named Joanne. Mark, a songwriter hoping to compose that one great tune, is still mourning his HIV-positive girlfriend's suicide, which holds him back from a relationship with his neighbor, vivacious flirt Mimi, an S&M club-dancer and drug user. Rounding out the group is Tom Collins, an HIV-positive philosophy professor who, after being mugged, is cared for by similarly afflicted drag-queen street drummer Angel, with whom he falls in love. But Benny, once a member of their circle, married the landlord's daughter, reneged on his promise of rent-free artists' space, and is now reviled by the ex-pals he threatens to evict from the tenements.
Set when AIDS equaled death, Rent casts these characters, half of whom we know will die from the disease, as metaphors: Who you love and how much matters more than what you do, and these people want to love as deeply as possible before death makes its inevitable, but premature claim.
Director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter) is surprisingly suited to the material—his greatest triumph is political, interpreting these "alternative lifestyles" as merely another colorful swath of the broad American quilt. And musical set pieces are staged with exhilarating pizzazz (try not rockin' out to "La Vie Boheme" or hip-wrigglin' to "The Tango Maureen"). Slices of the film feel ragged and disjointed—maddeningly so—but by the bittersweet, yet uplifting finale, the collective effect reflects actual life: a big, sloppy, noisy tapestry of experiences sour and sweet, rarely logical or sequential.
The electrifying cast is composed of nearly all the original Broadway performers, with a couple of exceptions. One is Rosario Dawson, who as Mimi unleashes skills she hasn't shown on screen before. Catlike and rawly sexual, her couch-pillow lips teasing and taunting, Dawson sings and dances with the strut and stride of an assured musical performer, yet mines the heartbreaking vulnerability the character needs.
Fans of Law & Order tough guy Jesse L. Martin who never saw him on Broadway as Tom Collins will be taken aback by the warm, lustrous power of his voice and his sheer sweetness (and perhaps by his liplock with Wilson Jermaine Heredia, whose Angel is a portrait of I-am-who-I-am integrity). And Taye Diggs lends conflicted humanity to Benny, a character who could otherwise lapse into Snidely Whiplash villainy.
Rent begs no comparison to recent movie musicals. It isn't Moulin Rouge—a cartoon with familiar pop ditties. It isn't Chicago—for all its razzmatazz, still conforming to the traditional structure of musicals. It isn't Phantom—a straight-up dark romance in frills and petticoats. It certainly isn't The Producers—the anticipated everybody-in-the-pool laugh riot due next month. If anything, it bears stylistic resemblance to Bob Fosse's fever dream, All That Jazz.
Above all, Rent is a furiously alive film that chooses passion over order, and passion is messy, an often surreal blitzkrieg of emotions that can leave you dazzled or dizzy. It isn't for everyone, ideologically, politically or cinematically. Rent is what it is, as it proclaims: Take me or leave me.