Movie Review: Jersey Boys

When you adapt a creative work, not everything translates from one medium to the other, so you need discriminate about what you keep. Clint Eastwood’s big screen adaptation of Jersey Boys sadly lacks this discerning sensibility and because of that, it doesn’t quite gel as a film. If the director and his writers made some shrewder adjustments to the material though, the movie might be more effective and entertaining.

Jersey Boys centers on the The Four Seasons, with a focus on frontman Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young). The film starts in New Jersey during the 1950s, where we meet Valli, Tommy (Vincent Piazza), and Nick (Michael Lomenda), three pals who are headed toward a life of crime. Luckily the guys meet a talented songwriter named Bob (Erich Bergen) and find a way out through music, rising to fame with a string of hits. Despite their success though, the band falls on hard times, forcing a breakup. But can they eventually set aside their differences to make music again?

Writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice translate their Broadway hit for the screen, and unfortunately in the process, they throw out the good influences of theater while saving the bad ones. Memorable singing in the moment you receive with stage performances is mostly ditched for showing songs in the context of gigs and recording sessions. When you see the tunes from that perspective you’d rather hear original recordings than the cast’s recreation of them. Although their renditions are solid, the actors can’t quite stack up to the real Four Seasons.

A terrible aspect of the movie retained from theater is the way its main characters constantly talk to the audience. This tactic jibes in theater where performers can play off an audience’s energy, however breaking the fourth wall just doesn’t work the same way in cinema. It takes very specific actors with just the right amount of chutzpah to pull it off. In that regard, the main actors in this film struggle with harnessing that audacity, since their primary experience is in theater.

Many leads from the Jersey Boys stage show reprise their roles here in the movie version, so it’s pleasant to see some fresh faces. Young, Piazza, Lomenda, and Bergen all give adequate performances, but as a whole they lack the charisma to carry the film. That’s why it’s great that Christopher Walken is around to inject much needed humor and energy as Gyp, the mob boss who’s in their corner.

Other aspects of this picture that are annoying include its blatant misogyny and abundance of obnoxious Italian-American stereotypes in dialogue. Understandably they were a mark of the times, but in a post Goodfellas and Sopranos world, being so heavy-handed with Italian stereotypes isn’t necessary since they’ve already been done to death in entertainment.

As a musical biopic Jersey Boys checks all the usual boxes: multi-decade storytelling, flashes of inspiration followed by musical numbers, struggles with addiction, fights between band members, bad makeup to portray aging, and occasional laughs. Yet it never really rises above mediocrity because Eastwood and his team aren’t as judicious in their adaptation as they should be. If they had been brave enough to veer away more from their source material with a more straight-ahead musical, everything might have worked better because elaborate song and dance numbers probably would have kept a more consistent pace. That approach could have also made a more memorable film, instead of another by-the-numbers biopic that will likely fade into obscurity a year from now.

✭✭