Get Up and Dance

Table dance?: Idina Menzel is centre stage in a scene from Rent. Photo Phil Bray. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

When Rent, the AIDS musical, came out in 1996, a close friend of mine had recently learned he was HIV-positive. I already knew a few people who had died of the syndrome. In that bleak time, the musical’s heart-warming ending struck such a false note. It seemed absurd, or worse, obscene, for a musical to convey its usual messages (seize the day, love one another) using AIDS as its vehicle. In Team America: World Police, the creators of South Park humourously highlighted the ethical and artistic problems of the project by depicting marionettes in a mock musical, Lease, cavorting on stage during a big production number called Everyone Has AIDS.

But from a distance of 10 years — in which time the crisis in the West has passed its acute phase and people have become able to live with AIDS — Rent the movie looks neither absurd nor obscene. The last decade has buffed this show’s rough edges, giving it a shine it never had before. Under a surface I once found so loathsome lay a musical in the sentimental tradition (hummable melodies, tribulations leading to triumph) and an adept rendering of an era, albeit one drawn in a cartoonish fashion.

Chris Columbus’s film attempts to recreate Jonathan Larson’s theatrical production, beginning with the eight cast members singing Rent’s theme song, Seasons of Love (“525,600 minutes… How do you measure a year?”). The musical follows the struggling artists and performers for a whole year, during which time these self-proclaimed members of the “Alphabet City avant-garde” are threatened with eviction from their loft, protest the gentrification of their neighborhood with performance art and fall in and out of love and drug addiction.

Instead of casting pop music sensations (Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera were rumoured to be up for parts), Columbus wisely opted to reassemble most of the original New York cast, capitalizing on their powerful voices and the fact that they’ve lived with these characters for so long. Idina Menzel, Wilson Jermaine Heredia and Jesse L. Martin (Lennie’s long-time partner on Law & Order) each deliver nuanced performances. The musical’s three love songs speak to different flavours of passion — straight, gay and lesbian — but all are made credible by the intense chemistry between the performers.

Stair climber: Rosario Dawson in Rent. Photo Phil Bray. Courtesy Columbia Pictures.

Columbus’s best casting decision was choosing the luminous, fearless Rosario Dawson to play Mimi. (The original Mimi, Daphne Rubin-Vega, was pregnant when the film was shot.) In one scene, Dawson paces the streets after a hard night of stripping, giving off equal parts don’t-mess-with-me attitude and sexiness, strutting in a way that must come naturally to the New York-bred actor. Although she sassily delivers one of the musical’s best lines — “They say that I have the best ass below 14th Street” — vulnerability in past roles has been more of a stretch; thankfully here, she manages it effortlessly. Dawson and the rest of the cast are not only worthy of each other, but fit together seamlessly.

When the performances are this good, the acting becomes almost transparent, exposing, for better and for worse, the underlying script. Larson’s musical often overreaches: it periodically makes sweeping statements about the nature of creativity, homelessness, the bourgeoisie and cyberspace. Like the musical, the film presents la vie Boheme as a lifestyle rich kids pursue to spite their parents. Their mission isn’t to create undying art, but to shock their bourgie folks with their drug use and alternative sexuality.

Larson is more sure-footed when he focuses on the soap operatic aspects of the story, loosely reworking Puccini’s La Bohème. At their best, Larson’s lyrics are as good as Cole Porter’s or Noel Coward’s. Following in the footsteps of Hair, Larson conjures the mid-1990s in a series of then-current cultural references: “To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo / To huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou.”

Ironically, what impressed me most about the film is the same thing that felt foul and emotionally manipulative in the original musical: Larson’s evocation of the era of the AIDS crisis. In a life-support meeting, people with AIDS seek to hold on to life through sheer hope, to evade premature death simply by chanting trendy mantras (“No day but today”). They talk about their low T-cell counts and worry aloud that they’ll lose their dignity as the disease progresses. Columbus’s staging wasn’t note-perfect, but to someone who sat through several such meetings, it felt authentic. In one scene, the camera pans the group and several of its members disappear, seemingly brushed off the screen.

Discussion of that era has become rare in our public discourse, almost as if the crisis never happened. It might be because of this general silence that what once felt so wrong about Rent now feels right. The film offers a rare occasion to let go, a bit, of the anxiety and grief pent up during the original crisis. For survivors, Larson’s message is simple: live for today, who knows what tomorrow will bring. Musicals have always pushed us to seize the day, but few have done so as persuasively as Rent.

Rent opens Nov. 23 across Canada.

Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.