Film - Fêted celebration of 1980s bohemia proves utterly square, writes Victoria Segal
Rent (12A)
"To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo/To huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou . . ./ To Sontag/To Sondheim/To anything taboo . . ." "La Vie Bohème", the big dance number in the middle of the late Jonathan Larson's much-fêted 1996 musical Rent, hits the nail on the head when it comes to enumerating the fads and fancies of the painting, dancing, drinking and drug- ging classes. Unfortunately, while Larson's reworking of Puccini's La Bohème seeks to portray the camaraderie of a group of friends as they battle poverty, drug addiction and Aids in late-1980s New York, it's about as cutting edge as Strictly Come Dancing.
Rent has a cult following among those who were seduced by its message of love and liberation and the mythology that comes from a writer dying of an aortic aneurysm the same day as his opening night. Saying you dislike it is, in certain quarters, pretty much like admitting that your tiny heart is frozen. Maybe you had to be there - either shooting up in a loft below 14th Street in 1989 or on Broadway seeing the original award-winning production - for Rent to strike a chord. But the real problem with Chris Columbus's film adaptation is that the chords it does hit are so utterly square. Musically, artistically, visually and thematically it's likely not so much to épater les bourgeois as lull them into a deep sleep. It's like going to a gallery where you've been promised exciting work by a daring new painter only to find a picture of dogs playing poker. The characters might be ripped fishnets and lurid drag, but the score, plot and dialogue are stonewashed denim shirts and neatly pressed jeans.
Focusing on a group of friends living in an East Village tenement, Rent tries to suggest the sense of value and community that comes with living on the edge. But though the attempt to evoke a time and place is charming, the characterisations lack subtlety. There's Mark (Anthony Rapp), a wannabe film-maker whose shrill performance-artist girlfriend Maureen (Idina Menzel) has just left him for a woman; Roger (Adam Pascal), Mark's rock-musician room-mate, a recovering junkie who is HIV-positive; love object Mimi (Rosario Dawson), an exotic dancer and far-from-recovering junkie who is HIV-positive; Tom Collins (Jesse L Martin), a part-time philosophy professor who is also HIV-positive; and his sweet-natured drag-queen boyfriend Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), who is . . . HIV-positive. I suddenly found myself filled with admiration for Trey Parker and Matt Stone's puerile puppet film Team America: world police and its spot-on Rent parody "Everyone Has Aids".
On the periphery is Benny (Taye Diggs), an ex-friend who sold out by marrying the landlord's daughter and is now trying to evict them so he can turn the building into a studio complex. You can't blame him, really: after two hours watching this relentless and unconvincing bohemia, I would have been just about ready to join the police myself, in order to move on the buskers and bust the graffiti artists.
There's no doubt that Rent has a heart of gold and that the paranoid terror of the growing Aids epidemic is dealt with touchingly. Martin's performance in particular shows the void left by the needless death of a loved one. Yet the most political statement that the film makes is Collins writing "Fight Aids now" on a restaurant chalkboard - and you don't have to live in a squat to agree with that. This is what is so grating about Rent - its smug assumption that you need to be in drag or poor to empathise. In fact, the most sympathetic character is Maureen's lover Joanne (Tracie Thoms), whose race and lesbianism seem less important than her Ivy League education and her job as a lawyer.
Chris Columbus, who managed to suck the magic out of the first two Harry Potter films, does the same with this adaptation. Scene after scene looks like an MTV ad, which is ironic, given the characters' anti-commercialism. In the opening number, flaming eviction notices fly from balconies like something from a bank advert. Later, Columbus breaks the hermetically sealed NYC vibe and follows Roger on a road trip through the desert: the result looks like a Bon Jovi video.
I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but this film makes it seem unfathomable that Larson's words and music could have been so acclaimed. Except for the joyous satirical specificity of "La Vie Bohème", these songs are hand-holding, lighters-in-the-air nonsense, a platitudinous mulch in which everyone is either on fire or living for today - a difficult trick to achieve. Mimi's death is even staved off by Roger singing his last "great" song to her, an anaesthetically dull soft-rock ballad that would crush the vital signs from the healthiest person. Instead, she comes round and says: "I was heading towards the light and I swear Angel was there." This isn't the world of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and the Paradise Garage - it's Patience Strong and Friends with dirty needles. Not so much Rent as a fixed-term, low-interest mortgage.
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