From the Archives: Rent (2005)
May 15th 2010 18:57
Rent (2005, Columbus)
Rent opens with the cast singing perhaps its most popular song, Seasons of Love, onstage in a space that could be the Nederlander Theater in New York City, the musical’s home for the past ten years. The camera pans behind the actors to reveal an empty theater. This is an isolated scene from the rest of the film, perhaps a metaphor for the transformation of stage to screen.
Director Chris Columbus is the man responsible for adapting Jonathan Larson’s musical. Usually a director of family films, he now tackles such dark subjects as homelessness and AIDS. Instead of sticking to the original material ala Chicago, Columbus provides a less faithful adaptation, cutting songs and changing timeframes. Whereas the first act of the play takes place in one night (on Christmas Eve), the film expands this to a few days, causing certain lyrics to be changed. Instead of nearly all the dialogue sung, the film chooses to change some of it to spoken word. This essentially slows down the pace, as does the decision to expand the timeframe of Act 1. However, it’s hard to say if it’s a good change. The musical thrives on energy, which essentially now been slowed.
Nevertheless, Columbus’s adaptation works, taking us into the lives of struggling actors, musicians, and dancers. Their struggles come in the form of money, food, eviction, and their own blood cells. After the credits, the film opens to Mark (Anthony Rapp), an aspiring filmmaker, riding home on his bike and beginning to sing the title song. He meets Roger (Adam Pascal) at their apartment, only to find an eviction notice and their power turned off. The entire “tent city,” including Mimi (Rosario Dawson), a drug addicted dancer, begin to burn their eviction notices, creating a street filled with sparse glowing embers.
Larson based his play on Puccini’s La Boheme. As Roger, a washed-up AIDS stricken musician, searches for “one great song,” he strums Musetta's Waltz from the Puccini opera. Later, the characters sing ‘La Vie Boheme.’ This is their Bohemia, and they’re about to lose it to a Cyber Arts Studio. Nearly all of the original cast members return in a brilliant casting move. These actors know their characters in and out, and the emotions expressed are genuine and real. Adam Pascal’s Roger is particularly effective, his eyes tortured. He hates his own skin and it’s highlighted in every defensive move he makes.
The running theme in Rent is “No Day But Today.” Larson was asking people to live each day as if it were their last. Tragically, he died the day before the show opening on Broadway due to an undetected brain aneurysm. It can’t be said that Larson died in vain, as he left behind a timeless piece of work that has been embraced by millions of people.
His other theme is love is love, no matter what form. Rent shows lesbian, and straight relationships and is adapted for the screen in a time when gay marriage is a hot debate (given social commentary in the film through a somewhat out of place added scene) and still unaccepted. It also comes at a time of year when many mainstream films with gay characters are coming out, including Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Dying Gaul. Larson wrote this play over ten years ago, yet hardly anything has changed.
At a screening audience to this film, an older woman was asked by her young granddaughter why the two women on screen were kissing. The grandmother’s response was, “It’s make-believe.” Instead of saying the honest answer: “they’re in love,” this woman chose “it’s make-believe.”
Apparently, it is better for children to be told love is not real if it isn’t between a man and a woman. Her response to the child negates everything Larson was trying to accomplish with his work and it’s sad that love, in all of its many forms, is not recognizable to most people.
Rent, the play or the film, will not change the way people think. All it can hope to do is shed some light on ignorance and breakdown the barriers that have been standing far too long. In the film, a strategically placed haunting image of Angel, an AIDS infected drag queen, let’s us remember that all life is precious, and all love should be recognized.
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