Review of Newsies (1992) by Rane P — 12 Jun 2012

Because Disney Can Get Anyone to Sing.

Of course, the real story of the newsboys' strike isn't quite so fun. Substantially less singing and dancing, I'm sure. Indeed, they only sort of won; while they didn't succeed in getting the price they paid for papers dropped back to its previous rate, at least the publishers agreed to buy back unsold papers. Before the strike, the newsies ate that loss. It was a matter of pennies a day, of course, but when you're an orphan selling papers on the streets of 1899 New York, pennies a day was the difference between having a roof over your head and not. That's the thing that I don't think a lot of people realize about this movie; maybe they would have had Disney resisted the urge to turn it into a musical. When it's a musical, you get cook little moppets with bad accents in elaborate dance numbers. If they had left it as a drama, the strike would have seen like less of a game and more the matter of life and death that it was.

Jack "Cowboy" Kelly (Christian Bale, yet!) is the charismatic leader of a bunch of winsome newspaper vendors in 1899 Manhattan. They buy bundles of a hundred papers for fifty cents and then sell them for a penny per. But Joseph Pulitzer (Robert Duvall), publisher of the [i]World[/i], is trying to make money to make up for how much he's spending in his battles with rival [i]Journal[/i] publisher William Randolph Hearst. He decides that his only option is to charge the boys sixty cents a bundle. Jack and fellow newsboy David Jacobs (David Moscow) decide that the only solution is for the newsies to go on strike. They form a union through the old-fashioned method of saying, "Hey, we have a union now!" With the help of music hall singer Medda Larkson (Ann-Margret) and apparently wealthy cub reporter Bryan Denton (Bill Pullman), they work to get their own message out to the people of New York and force Pulitzer to go back to fifty cents a bundle.

It's really hard to make a musical, especially with people who aren't already singers and dancers. (They set up a dance camp, essentially, and the boys spent ten weeks learning how to do the dances.) It's also hard to make a movie with a lot of kids. This movie had room to be a lot worse than it was. Unfortunately, those dance numbers are awfully dated. They're from the '90s, and it isn't the 1890s. Dance sequences from the 1890s would have involved fewer pelvic thrusts--as in, none. Some of the arm movements are very much out of MTV of the era as well. The accents are also frequently very bad. Oh, Christian Bale is convincingly American, if not convincingly from New York, and of course Max Casella actually talks like that. However, a lot of the actors sound like, well, ten-year-old kids faking New York accents. The thickest, most impenetrable New York accents they can manage. This is one of the obvious problems with casting in Los Angeles for a movie set in New York, I guess.

Still, this could have been a lot worse. The songs are, okay, not great. But they're not bad, either. The production values when it comes to sets and costume are very good indeed; Joseph Pulitzer's private study is an actual period room. (From the Pasadena Historical Society; I've been in the room watching the clip of Pulitzer in the room.) The adult actors are erratically cast; this is probably the only movie ever made starring Bill Pullman, Ann-Margret, and Robert Duvall. Possibly any combination thereof. However, they're all good at acting, so there's that. You also have to admit that not every kids' movie talks about the serious problems of child labour in nineteenth century New York. And having Theodore Roosevelt (David James Alexander) is not such a [i]deus ex machina[/i] as all that; child labour was actually a subject that TR cared about, and he was governor of New York at the time. And in fact, the movie reduces the severity of the situation--in real life, bundles went from sixty-five to eighty-five cents.

And, yes, there is Christian Bale. His early career fascinates me, frankly. The first thing I ever saw him in was [i]Swing Kids[/i]--which is also kind of not a very good movie, though one that I love a great deal. He's eight and a half months older than my older sister, so it's easy to compare what she was doing at the same time as he was accomplishing things. As in, she graduated from high school class of '92. So she started high school around the time he was doing Shakespeare for Kenneth Branagh. And then a few years later, Kenneth Branagh declined billing so that he wouldn't be above Christian Bale in the advertising. So far as I know, this is the only musical Christian Bale has ever been in (if you don't count [i]I'm Not There[/i] and voice acting for [i]Pocahontas[/i]), and he does a really impressive job. He even learned how to spin a rope for this, and it looks as though he wasn't some kid from Wales who learned to do it a couple of weeks earlier.