Film: Hair Metal Sing-Along and the Discreet Vibrator
Depending where you were during the mid-to-late eighties, the hair metal explosion was either a scourge on rock music or a blast of over-the-top decadence. I was in high school, so I couldn’t get enough of bands like Bon Jovi, Poison and Twisted Sister. (“I WANNA ROCK!”) You would think my fanboy credentials would make me a perfect candidate to enjoy a movie like Rock of Ages, but this sanitized blob is nobody’s idea of a perfect pop-music jukebox.
Barely held together by the slimmest of plots, this adaptation of Chris D’Arienzo’s 2006 Broadway musical, one of two new releases I’m reviewing this week, attempts to do for the critically reviled genre what Mamma Mia! did for Abba. It’s a high-concept karaoke machine that mistakes an affinity for clichéd eighties props for a genuine approximation of the era. I would describe it as a bad feature-length episode of Glee with third-rate computer graphics, but as a devoted Gleek I can attest that the show already covered this territory with considerably more flair.
The negligible story, set in 1987 and inspired by Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” kicks into gear when fresh-off-the-bus Oklahoma waitress Sherrie Christian (the Footloose remake’s Julianne Hough) meets wannabe rocker Drew Boley (Mexican pinup crush Diego Boneta) on the Sunset Strip. Instantly smitten with the new arrival, Drew convinces his boss Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin), heart-of-gold owner of the fictional Sunset Strip bar The Bourbon Room, to give her a job. Drew aspires to become a rock god like Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise, nicely cast against type), who has been booked by his oily manager Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti) to play at Dupree’s bar with his band Arsenal before embarking on a solo career.
Instead of reveling in skuzzy nature of the source material, director Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House, Cheaper by the Dozen 2), jettisons almost all of the musical’s dark-side-of-showbiz elements. In their place, he adds new characters like Constance Sack (Malin Akerman), a curvy Rolling Stone reporter intent on exposing Stacee as a washed-up sellout, and Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones), devoutly Catholic wife of devoutly Catholic (down to the unbridled libido and hidden mistress) Mayor Mike Whitman (Bryan Cranston, wasted here). Zeta-Jones appears in the only sequence that feels like a carefully crafted musical number. Wearing a salmon suit with a matching pleated skirt, she belts out “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” inside a chapel joined by members of a conservative women’s league. The rest of the film feels like it was slapped together with point-and-shoot randomness. There is nothing in Shankman’s digital, day-glo colored visuals that feels remotely like the eighties, and none of the South Florida locations used to stand in for Los Angeles capture the city’s smoggy allure.
Shankman, a choreographer-turned-Hollywood-hack, made an aesthetic quantum leap with Hairspray, his previous stage-to-screen endeavor, but he can’t make heads or tails of Rock of Ages’ motley crew of dreamers. The film lurches from one uninspired mashup to the next without building any narrative momentum, the one element that could have served as counterpoint to the endless array of Disney Channel-ready covers of songs like Extreme’s “More Than Words” and Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart.”
There aren’t many bright spots in Rock of Ages, but they mostly revolve around Cruise’s daffy, faux-Zen Buddhist portrait of a rock star that recalls Steve Perry, Bret Michaels and, most of all, Axl Rose. Like the film, Cruise’s persona is too wholesome to pull off playing an aging music icon like Jaxx. He shows off his black nail polish as if he’s never tried it on before. Unlike the rest of the cast, who look like they’re sleepwalking through their roles, however, he and Zeta-Jones appear to be trying. Their work, unfortunately, merely makes Hough and Boneta’s squeaky-clean screen presence all the more insufferable. As they play out their TV-movie, on-again/off-again love affair, I just kept thinking of the striking similarities between Shankman’s film and Steven Antin’s Burlesque, an enjoyably catty backstage yarn that, unlike Rock of Ages, is actually kind of fun.
The other eighties film currently showing in theaters takes place in the 1880s. The tea-and-crumpets crowd will very likely be looking for counterprogramming this weekend, but they’re better off staying home and rewatching the second season of Downton Abbey than sitting through Hysteria, a revisionist chronicle of nothing less than the creation of the electric vibrator. The film reduces the meaty subject to a civics lesson about gender equality that falls prey to hindsight bias.
The story follows idealistic middle class doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy), whose near-obsessive devotion to the healing arts has had him sacked from one job after another. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce) sees a kindred spirit in the young physician when he hires him on the spot to help him out with well-to-do London women suffering from the titular condition. Dalrymple’s suffragette daughter Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal, showing off her Nanny McPhee Returns accent) sees Daddy’s “treatment” for what it is: a euphemism for making their patients achieve orgasm. Their symptoms, explains Dalrymple, “stem from an overactive uterus.” This movie is shocked, shocked, to discover doctors felt this way about their female patients.
Stimulated, and a little repulsed, by Charlotte, who’s trying to help and educate the poor in defiance of her disapproving father, Granville is ultimately torn between settling for a life of financial comfort and pursuing a more exciting, far riskier career devoted to making a change. (Look out for those community organizers!) A major problem with Hysteria is that the inventor of the revolutionary bedroom device, Edmund St-John-Smythe, is relegated to the sidelines, a minor character in a film that should have been all about him. Rupert Everett, who attacks the role like an older, seedier variation of his character in Another Country, brings the right mixture of irreverence and aristocratic disaffection to a role that should have amounted to much more than a joke-spewing plot device.
Ah, but having a self-professed “deviant” headline this tame comedy of errors would have gotten in the way of director Tanya Wexler’s feminist-lite agenda. (Composer Gast Waltzing’s incessant Masterpiece Theater score doesn’t help matters.) There’s no juice to Granville’s paradigm shift, zero spark in the film’s twee depiction of its characters’ sexual politics, only a wan romantic triangle with the outcome telegraphed far in advance. For a movie so intent about thumbing its nose at conventional mores, Hysteria is dispiritingly discreet. It lacks thrust.
