Review: ‘Jersey Boys’

Here is one of my patent-pending “a day late and a dollar short” reviews, cause I saw “Jersey Boys” a week ago and still haven’t gotten around to doing this, and by now enough has been written about this movie that is there really anything that I can add, or will it just be more white noise? In any case here we go, a quick little write up on an adaptation of an extremely popular Broadway musical featuring the music of the late 1950’s made by the guy best known for starring in Westerns and Cop films and directing muted films scattered over a wide array of genres.

I did not grow up listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and I never saw the Broadway musical which this movie is based on (which itself is the “official” story of the Valli and the Four Seasons, as still living group members Valli and writer-producer Bob Gaudio produced the whole thing, hence telling their side of the story, so take that how you will), and as a matter of fact, I am the kind of person who just realized thanks to this movie that a bunch of songs I’ve heard over and over were actually written and performed by the same group. So this is all to say that I was able to sit down and watch this movie without any baggage of having to compare it to the musical or having any vested emotions into the group and what they meant to me (as in the long run they really mean nothing to me), hence there is nothing for me to get hung up on, I can just watch this movie as just that, a movie.

And with that said…this movie was ai’ight. It is kind of light in the long run, despite being a story that spans decades and involves all the hallmarks of such musical biopics, i.e. rise to fame, infidelity, criminal behavior, violence, drugs, sex, and so on and so forth. Maybe because while all of this stuff is touched upon throughout the story, none of it really gets explored, as it is all surface level and superficial, often times reduced to coming across as a parody of such movies.

For example, in the span of four separate scenes Frankie Valli meets a girl, marries her, fights with her over not being home due to working on the road, and then gets kicked out of the house, leaving behind FOUR daughters, whom we never get to know. Valli doesn’t have a wife in this movie, he has a caricature of a wife, always drunk and screaming and raging, and the same goes for the one of the four daughters that we actually get to see on more than one occasion, as she only exists in this story as a way to make Valli sad and mopey.

Actually Valli spends most of this movie being vaguely sad and mopey, while most of the energy comes not from him but from band founder and member Tommy, who also gets the group involved with some mob shenanigans that could get them in trouble, though the danger never ever feels real or immediate, and instead just comes across as more of a hindrance and an annoying obstacle to overcome. Everyone in the movie, especially Tommy, repeat over and over how they are all attracted to Frankie and they are all drawn to him as he is their meal ticket out of the tough neighborhoods of New Jersey, but meanwhile in this movie Frankie Valli does a lot of standing around and not being very magnetic. We NEED the characters to tell us this guy is compelling because otherwise he is NOT compelling, he’s just a bland dude with a sweet falsetto.

And thank goodness for that falsetto because the movie only comes alive during the few times the guys start singing, banging out hit after hit, and directed well enough by Clint Eastwood, who still brought his laconic style to this supposedly exuberant story, and which makes for a weirdly muted movie, one that is TELLING us that this musical group is special but really SHOWS a much more staid and banal series of events which are not unique to this group at all.

But then again there are a few weird things in this movie, like Bob Gaudio’s horrifying late-1960’s goatee, or how the same type of terrible old age make up from “J. Edgar” comes back around in this movie, or even how Frankie Valli at the very end, talking to the camera, remarks how it all started with the four guys singing under a street lamp, which leaves one wondering why the image of these four guys singing under a street lamp doesn’t actually happen in this movie until the VERY end, AFTER Valli mentions it. “Hey remember that time we did that thing that we never mentioned or showed you? That was great.” Yea, thanks a lot, Frankie.

It is not really a bad movie, but a little boring because despite us being told this is a special story, there is nothing special about it outside of the agreeable music of the Four Seasons. “Jersey Boys” is a little nostalgic trip down memory lane, sprinkled with hits, and centered around one of the least compelling people in music biopic history.