I generally write these reviews immediately after watching
the film, so that my impressions are fresh and my feelings aren’t clouded by
the passage of time. And after watching Jersey Boys, only one feeling comes to
mind: exhaustion. Jersey Boys is a marathon of a film, obligatorily moving from plot
point to plot point in the lives and times of Frankie Valli and The Four
Seasons, from their humble, slightly nefarious beginnings, to their meteoric
rise to fame, to the events that drove the group apart, and finally to Frankie
Valli’s struggling solo career. To a fan
of The Four Seasons, I’m sure this is just a gold mine of fascinating
performances that provide real insight into the band’s amazing story. For the rest of us… Well, I can certainly think
of better ways to spend two hours.
The film starts off strong enough, establishing Valli as a
down-on-his-luck kid growing up in New Jersey who, through the help of a seedy
mentor named Tommy DiVito, comes to join a band called The Four
Lovers. The band struggles for a few
years, playing dives and small stages, until songwriter Bob Gaudio joins the
group and the band starts producing hits under the new name The Four Seasons.
Until this point, the film has a period-piece feel to it, emphasizing
the 1950s atmosphere and probably making more than a few grandparents nostalgic
for the good ol’ days. This is a Clint
Eastwood film, after all.
However, the film makes a notable shift in tone once the band
becomes famous. It starts montaging
through the group’s greatest hits, and suddenly we’re seeing the life and times
of a partying group of successful musicians.
We see Frankie Valli’s home life fall apart due to his perpetually
prolonged absences, creating a conflict that, while nothing we haven’t seen
before in this genre, is still sympathetic.
This is all well and good, but then the film stops and drops a bombshell
on us, telling us that it hasn’t all been paradise.
The film then rewinds itself two years into the past, and starts portraying events that lead up to the band eventually breaking up
in the events shortly after the bombshell event. Now, if this had served a narrative purpose
other than showing two completely different sets of events with thematic
similarities, I would have been on board.
If, for example, the film had deigned to reframe certain events so that
we were shown how the film had misdirected the audience into thinking
everything was swell, that would have been fine. But to show a parallel narrative after a key
turning point in order to show that point’s significance is just lazy writing.
The remaining half hour of the film dwells on Frankie
Valli’s post-Seasons career, working hard to support his family and finally be
there for his daughter. His redemption
arc in the eyes of his daughter falls more than a bit flat because up until
this point, she hasn’t been a relevant character, and so it’s impossible to
care about her or her feelings for her father.
Instead, we’re supposed to take on faith that Valli is trying his best
to reconnect with the teenager, but the focus is so much on Valli’s effort that
we never see the pay-off of whether he actually succeeded.
The film’s epilogue is over-long to the point where I was
pacing my living room just waiting for the damn thing to end. I wasn’t emotionally invested in the
characters, who had seemed to somehow become more two-dimensional as the film
went on, and I just didn’t care about the history lesson about a band I’m only
marginally familiar with. Maybe this
film just wasn’t for me, but I somehow get the feeling that the intended
audience for this film is people who may just be trying to catch a glimpse of
times long past. I can’t begrudge that,
but for the rest of us, this film will likely be forgotten by history.
The Four Seasons.
Discuss or something in the comments below.
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