The New York Times - November 23, 2005
A. O. Scott

Approaching Chris Columbus's film adaptation, which reunites most of the original Broadway cast to belt out Mr. Larson's lung-stretching songs about love, art, real estate and AIDS, I was inclined toward the latter category. Two hours later, I was pleased (and somewhat surprised) to find myself an us, for once, instead of a them. Some aesthetic objections still stand - on screen as onstage, "Rent" is often dramatically jumbled and musically muddled - but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat.

Some of the performers look a little old for their parts but nonetheless bring the ardent conviction of young strivers to the material, which is just what it needs. The characters, after all, are a diverse collection of young strivers themselves, living on Avenue A in the long-ago year of 1989.

Mark (Anthony Rapp) is an aspiring filmmaker recently dumped by Maureen (Idina Menzel), a performance artist who has taken up with a lawyer named Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Mark's roommate, Roger (Adam Pascal), is a musician and a recovering addict who lost one lover to AIDS and is therefore reluctant to get involved with Mimi (Rosario Dawson, like Ms. Thoms a new addition to the cast), an exotic dancer who lives downstairs. AIDS also shadows the otherwise perfect love between Tom (Jesse L. Martin), a semi-employed philosophy instructor, and Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a sweet, tough transvestite. Popping in every now and then is Benny (Taye Diggs), another old pal who owns the building where Roger, Mimi and Mark live and who represents the twin specters of gentrification and generational sell-out.

In telling their entwined stories, Mr. Columbus has managed a feat similar to the one he pulled off with the first two "Harry Potter" movies; he has taken a source that is fiercely and jealously loved by its core fans and refrained from messing it up. It is not just that he shows dexterity and imagination in transferring the spectacle onto the actual streets of the East Village in Manhattan. The real key to his success is his utter lack of condescension.

"Rent" is nothing if not earnest - a full-throated, breathless defense of na ve idealism and unapologetic joie de vivre in the face of death - and the slightest whisper of knowingness or cynicism would spoil it. But a cameo from the smarty-pants shock comedian Sarah Silverman notwithstanding, Mr. Columbus's movie believes in itself utterly, and affirms that Mr. Larson's creation belongs with "Hair" and "Fame" in the pantheon of immortal musicals with one-word titles celebrating the self-dramatizing, unembarrassable and resilient spirit of youth.

In other words, "Rent" is occasionally silly, often melodramatic and never subtle. Every song swells toward bombast, and every theme, musical or narrative, is underlined almost to the point of illegibility. Mr. Larson's attempt to force the marriage of rock and Broadway often sends the worst of both genres into noisy collision, as if Meat Loaf and Andrew Lloyd Webber were reworking "Exile on Main Street." Certainly, the musical traditions of the show's native ground - home to the Velvet Underground, the Ramones, Sonic Youth and so on - are hardly audible in its tunes. But to raise such objections - or to chide "Rent" for its childish politics or its simplistic and instantly obsolete vision of the New York demimonde - is to think like a them.

Yes, Bohemia is dead. Its funeral rites are pronounced by Mr. Larson's best song ("La Vie Boheme," quoted earlier), a wondrously nonsensical catalog of tastes, ideas and attitudes ranging from microbrewed beers to Kurosawa movies, with a toast along the way to "Sontag and to Sondheim and to everything taboo." But the passage of time, which has left almost nothing taboo, has also inoculated "Rent" against the disdain of hipsters who might find it woefully unsophisticated. Its idea of Bohemia is not realistic, but romantic, even utopian. Openhearted to a fault, it stakes its integrity on the faith that even in millennial New York, some things - friendship, compassion, grief, pleasure, beauty - are more important than money or real estate.

It never hurts to be reminded. Precisely because some of the specific concerns of "Rent" have become dated, the truth at its heart is clearer than ever. It is undeniably sentimental, but its sentimentality might serve as a balm to those of us, in New York and elsewhere, who sometimes find ourselves living in the long, tuneless sequel. Who would ever want to see a show called "Mortgage"?

"Rent" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has drug use, some obscenity and a brief flash of nudity.

Rent

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Chris Columbus; written by Stephen Chbosky, based on the musical (book, music and lyrics) by Jonathan Larson; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by Richard Pearson; choreography by Keith Young; production designer, Howard Cummings; produced by Mr. Columbus, Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, Mark Radcliffe and Michael Barnathan; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 135 minutes.

WITH: Rosario Dawson (Mimi), Taye Diggs (Benny), Wilson Jermaine Heredia (Angel), Jesse L. Martin (Tom Collins), Idina Menzel (Maureen), Adam Pascal (Roger), Anthony Rapp (Mark Cohen) and Tracie Thoms (Joanne).

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