Review of Jersey Boys (2014) by Margateexpert — 05 Jul 2014

The single review I read before seeing this film was over-the-top nasty -- but also mostly wrong. The reviewer, presumably a relative youngster, appears to have missed the fact that the material was deliberately presented in the hokey style of a 1940s/50s Hollywood biopic. Plot points in 'Jersey Boys' are not subtle, the gangsters are not Joe Pesci-style psychopaths, and the acting is definitely not Method. Some biopics that possess the gritty qualities of real life – films about Johnny Cash, Lenny Bruce, Ray Charles, Jacqueline Dupre and Andy Kaufman come to mind -- are engrossing as a kind of cinema verite. But equally engrossing are some of the hokiest bios of an earlier generation, including The Glenn Miller Story, The Five Pennies, The Eddy Duchin Story, The Pride of the Yankees and Lust for Life (Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh.).

A key point in Jersey Boys concerns how Frankie Valli's career took off when song writer Bob Gaudio entered his life musically. Valli had been singing Dean Martin-type songs before then, and although it's clear that his voice would have been interesting to anyone in the audience, the songs failed to take advantage of his unique vocal gifts. So when Gaudio sits down at the piano and riffs a “perfect” Frankie Valli song, viewers get the same electrical jolt that Valli himself and the members of his band must have felt when they realized what had been missing from their music all along. Although it's possible that no such epiphany occurred and that the musical meshing of Gaudio and Valli evolved over weeks or months rather than in a single, dramatically charged instant, the film succeeds at artfully compressing the process so that it packs an old-fashioned dramatic wallop.

As Picasso said, art is a lie that tells the truth. Director Eastwood does this so well here that we are reminded not only of his great gift for presenting musical themes and subjects, but of the enormous skill he has acquired as a director over the years in choosing which details to emphasize visually and aurally. Eastwood is no less talented as a producer, and he has spared no expense in giving this film the look of the Fifties and Sixties when the Four Seasons climbed from obscurity to the top of the pop-music world. If you enjoyed the stage version of “Jersey Boys,” you will also appreciate the addition of some important biographical material that presumably was cut from the play because it might have bogged it down. It adds dramatic weight to the story without burdening viewers with too many plot lines and characters. This is one of the summer’s best films so far, a great “date movie,” and a highly entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.