Washington Blade - November 18, 2005
Tray Butler, Columnist

FOR A QUICK summary of everything that's wrong with "Rent," the new big-screen adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical, look no further than lyrics written by its late composer Jonathan Larson.

In "La Vie Boheme," the first act's show-stopping restaurant number, our merry crew of Alphabet City misfits zealously sing a "eulogy" for the bohemian life. The characters also toast to "hating convention, hating pretension" and never playing "the Fame Game."

Alas, poor Larson, how they use your words against you. Director Chris Columbus - has taken an already flawed urban fairy tale and somehow squeezed it into a thoroughly conventional popcorn chomper.

IN CASE YOU missed the last decade of hoopla, the Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning musical "Rent" relates the tale of eight people living in Manhattan's pre-gentrification East Village in the late '80s. Four of them are HIV-positive, all of them artsy.

Larson's sudden death on the eve of opening night gave an eerie resonance to the musical's otherwise trite "seize the day" sermon. A rabid fan base has kept "Rent" on Broadway for eight years and created a worldwide industry.

Columbus (of "Mrs. Doubtfire" fame) deserves kudos for casting nearly all of the show's original actors, bringing six of the original principals back to the roles they defined. It's a bold choice, considering that Anthony Rapp, Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and crew should now be approximately 10 years too old to be rolling pennies on Avenue A.

The director also does an admirable job of streamlining Larson's sometimes hard-to-follow plot, rearranging some numbers and snipping out nearly 30 minutes of music. His choice to start the movie with the crowd-pleasing "Seasons of Love" might strike some "Rent"-heads as sacrilegious, but the new opening adds an emotional resonance that actually works.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK nearly as well is the photography itself. An overly glossy but ultimately bland East Village backdrop just tries too hard to be taken seriously.

And Columbus may be the only director alive today who can take cross-dressing street people and intravenous heroin use and make them feel antiseptic. One scene of a character shooting up in a rainy alley comes across as particularly absurd.

Larson's original plot remains mostly intact, complete with its two same-sex romances. In this telling, the relationship between Joanne (newcomer Tracie Thoms) and Maureen (Idina Menzel) truly sizzles, particularly in their cleverly bitchy duet, "Take Me or Leave Me."

By comparison, the gay male storyline fizzles. Wilson Jermaine Heredia gives drag queen Angel a tangible humanity, and his costumes steal most every scene. But Angel's romance with Collins ("Law & Order's" Jesse L. Martin) never takes flight. On the surface, it looks like a relationship, and the two even kiss, but compared to the girls, these guys come across as positively chaste.

It's a classic straight man's rendition of queer sexuality: Sure, we'll let the lesbians go at it, but if you're gonna have two dudes smooch, one of them better be wearing a dress.

And therein lies the essential contradiction of "Rent." To anyone who knows a thing about being gay today, who has experienced the reality of AIDS firsthand or who's ever sat through an actual drag show, "Rent" comes across at best as dated, and at worst as cloying and borderline insulting.

Bad news, Bohemia, but the yuppy scum have won.

051118
WB051113

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