Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

There was a brief period in the 2000s when a lot of the great Broadway musicals of the last few decades were brought to movie theaters. Rent is one of the most modern musicals in that sweep, but what I know about it is basically “a bunch of young friends trying to keep going when their high rent is starving them” and “the AIDS musical”.

After watching the movie:

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Mark Cohen (art filmmaker working on his first great documentary) and his roommate Roger Davis (songwriter trying to write his one great song before succumbing to AIDS) get an eviction notice. The owner of the building, Benny, was previously their roommate before he married into wealth and bought the apartment block and the lot next door used as a homeless encampment, and had previously told Mark and Roger not to worry about their rent, but is now telling them to pay twelve months’ back rent or leave by next week. However, if they can convince Mark’s ex-girlfriend Maureen (who left Mark for a lawyer named Joanne) to call off her performance art protest of the destruction of the homeless camp to build a “cyber studio”, he’ll forget the rent. Another former roommate, Collins, now an NYU instructor back in New York for the holidays, gets mugged and helped by exuberant drag queen Angel and invited to join her Life Support AIDS group. Exotic dancer Mimi, Mark and Roger’s downstairs neighbor, tries to flirt with Roger, but he rudely rejects her rather than telling her he’s AIDS-positive. Joanne, having met and exchanged notes with Mark, is now very troubled by Maureen’s roving eyes. Maureen’s performance goes on and is mostly peaceful until the police Benny had on standby push back the enthusiastic crowd, and Mark is able to sell his footage of the riot to Buzzline, who offer him a fantastic job if he only sells out everything he’s ever believed in.

I had not realized this was a modernization of La Boheme. Maybe I’d caught a snatch of a notion that the characters celebrate their Vie Boheme, perhaps to the point of having heard there’s a song about it, but I never knew it was drawing directly from the opera. It completely redefined my understanding of what I was about to see when I saw that credit on screen, and now I’m more interested in learning about the opera.

It seems that most of the cast is reprised from the Broadway run and while that’s pretty much always the best call, this movie came almost fifteen years after the show opened, and these young friends aren’t actually very young. I’m not sure if that makes it more of a testament to their commitment to their Bohemian lifestyles and how much it strains credulity that they haven’t yet really had to choose between starving and selling out.

I came in ready to like Anthony Rapp’s character but I did not expect to like Collins so much. Maybe he’s the most grounded of the protagonists, since he actually has something of a day job but he’s still on the side of the dreamers. Maybe it’s better handled in the stage version but everything between Mimi and Benny that came out in the second act came out of nowhere for me. Isn’t Benny supposed to be married to a rich girl? Where is she when Benny is taking in his heroin addict exotic dancer ex-girlfriend? Some excuses are made for her absence once in the first act but then she completely drops out of the picture. Angel is a lot of fun but plays (deliberately?) in the ambiguous space between drag queen and trans woman, and then she’s gone so that everyone else can Feel Things about that, which is an unfortunate trope.

While “Seasons of Love” is the main motif and justifiable hit single, and the title song gets some play, I think some of the less well known songs were better.  “Today 4U” is Angel’s proper introduction, so of course it’s charismatic. “Life Support” and “Will I” are beautiful ruminations that feel like a large component of the point of the show, right along with the thesis statement of “What You Own”. “Take Me or Leave Me” is Maureen’s best contribution to the show (with Joanne), a nice palate cleanser from what I hope was meant to be a parody of bad performance art that was “Over The Moon”. “I’ll Cover You” is a simple, sweet, love song. But my favorite that didn’t seem like it had a significant amount of plot significance. hanging on it was the “Tango Maureen”.

I can see why this show would mean a lot to a lot of people, but I don’t know if it really spoke to me in the way I hoped it would. I probably met it too late in my life, but also I have never really had to fear and wrestle with AIDS in the way it was in the late 80s. I’ve always lived in a world where AIDS is much less of a risk, better understood, and highly manageable, if still stigmatized. My generation’s Rent was probably Avenue Q, though I’d still recommend this more.