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Live stage musicals have a reputation for translating poorly to the
screen. Rent is no exception. The original off-Broadway play was written by
Jonathan Larson and went on to win Pulitzer and Tony Awards. Steve Chbosky turned it into
a screenplay and Chris Columbus directed the film version. It may be said that committing Rent
to film has created a historical record which captures the essence of the early years of
AIDS, an epoch-altering moment in time. And it may be said that Rent the film also
inspires cringingly painful comparisons to Hair
the film.
In Rent a group of friends bond together into a family, struggling
as young artists to find themselves personally and artistically. Poignant immediacy is
invoked by the knowledge that some of them are also expecting to die from AIDS at any
time. An artistic statement typical of its time, Rent today comes across as full of
maudlin sentimentality and cliches of bohemian life. The brutal realities of race and
class warfare in American society (New York City’s East Village circa 1989) that the
film dramatizes come across as melodrama.
Rent distinguishes itself from most other first-wave AIDS art
primarily in that it is not set inside a stereotypically gay ("urban middle-class
white male") ghetto, where the AIDS pandemic first struck in America. (Most of the
early artistic output in response to AIDS, including Rent, proved to be highly
polemical and aesthetically negligible, and has, for the most part, faded from collective
historical memory.) During the 1980s the gay cutting edge of bohemian New York shifted
away (because priced out) from the West Village and morphed with the more sexually and
ethnically diverse bohemian scene of the East Village and its fringes in Alphabet City (on
the Lower East Side).
Rent’s bohemian family is a checklist of queer diversity
– an African-American dancer "Tom" Collins (Jesse L. Martin), his lover the
Latino drag queen/performance artist Angel (Wilson Germaine Heredia), the Jewish film
maker Mark Cohen (Anthony Rapp), his ex-girlfriend-turned-lesbian/bisexual punk
performance artist rebelling against her well-off parents Maureen (Idina Menzel), and her
girlfriend the Ivy-educated lawyer of even richer, black parents Joanne (Tracie Thoms).
White-as-a-West-Coast-rock-band Roger (Adam Pascal) is an aspiring song writer who becomes
hopelessly enmeshed with the Latina "exotic dancer"/street hooker and heroin
addict, Mimi (Rosario Dawson). And rounding out the family is Benny (Taye Diggs), the
(heterosexual) African-American ex-roommate who ditched the bohemian
collective-in-a-warehouse to marry the landlord’s daughter and whose battle with his
ex-friends to evict them (on Christmas Eve no less) serves as the basic dramatic conflict.
To make matters worse, the story would seem to call for a subtle use of acting and
cinematographic techniques to convey the bohemian "authenticity" its original
creators so obviously believed in. Instead, the nearly nonstop, opera-like deployment of
unmemorable, unmelodic, lip-synched songs exacerbates the undeniable fact that the play is
a fictional contrivance.
In Rent all the characters struggle, with varying degrees of
self-awareness, realizing that their youthful rebellion is as much about that adolescent
rite of passage, becoming independent from parents, as it is about rediscovering the truth
of the world. The latter will, of necessity, lead to "selling out," as the
musical’s title drives home – everyone seems to realize that rent has to
be paid eventually, one way or another. What would seem to set Rent apart from
its bohemian antecedents is the added dimension of the unfair and cruel taskmaster of
AIDS. And yet, even this is the stuff of the first myth of Bohemia – true artists
suffer nobly and often die prematurely, mostly from consumption or some icky sexually
transmitted disease, or poverty, or lack of recognition or enough commercial success to
pay the rent and put food on the table.
Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, the rallying cry
of artistic Bohemia has been authenticity and individuality and suffering nobly, in the
name of artistic creation (or the other way around). Just as important to the bohemian
aesthetic is taking a political stand, through one’s art and one’s chosen
lifestyle as "bohemian artist." Every generation of bohemians has rebelled
against the ruling class, its power structure, its moral values and artistic tastes, its
perceived hypocrisy or, in the immortal word of Holden Caufield, "phoniness."
Rent, the film, regrettably enough, is no longer avant-garde. And
The Band Played On (based on the nonfiction
book
- Les Wright
