The day after Thanksgiving, we went downtown to have some lunch, see the Tiffany glass show at SAM, watch the Christmas tree lighting at Westlake center, and catch Walk the Line at the Meridian. We were too late to make a value matinee of that movie, so we saw Rent instead.
We’d last seen Rent toward the end of the millennium on stage at the Ahmanson in LA during Christmas, while Doogie Hauser was still in the show, but after Ricky from My So-Called Life had gone on to play Angel on Broadway. It was a pleasant enough entertainment, as I recall, more rocking and significant in an Angels in America kind of way than your typical Broadway musical. But it wasn’t as memorable as staying at the Intercontinental Hotel – now the Omni – in a very nicely appointed room, instead of sleeping on the fold-out couch at my parents’ place – actually by that time just my mother’s place, my father having died shortly after Rent opened on Broadway – as we typically did before that trip. I think my wife liked it more than I.
Alas, Rent has not aged well, and the movie did some things that made it more off-putting than it otherwise might have been. The story seemed wonderfully topical when it came out; now it just seems dated, stuck in a zeitgeist very different from today. Filmmaker Mark resists and finally refuses to “sell out” to do news stories for network TV – who would do that today? Everyone who could sold out to the dot coms in the late 90s, when the selling was good. Favoring the homeless over new condos? Dreaming of building a multimedia art center, and not just making a multimedia art career? The world seems to have lost a lot of idealism since Rent first hit the boards.
Or become a lot more conventional in its concerns. The movie adds a whole gay wedding thing with Maureen and Joanne’s parents in attendance – and Anna Deavere Smith playing Joanne’s mother, for chrissakes – in a vain and oddly bourgeois attempt to regain lost relevance. Gay marriage is a post-AIDS issue; Rent is the cri de coeur of the generation that first came down with the disease – before it finally killed off a youth culture increasingly focused on polymorphous promiscuity since the 1960s, not commitment. I’m surprised they didn’t add a scene on safe sex, or needle exchange.
One thing we actually liked about the movie also weakened it dramatically: the sumptuous location shots in Greenwich Village. It brought back places and scenes we’d cavorted amongst in our own youth, when like an ur-Tom Collins I was studying deconstruction in grad school a trainride away at Yale – Rent the movie succeeds mainly as travelogue, a cinematic tour through times, theaters and places that have vanished today.
While you’re checking out the scenery, however, you lose focus on the musical itself. I’m not sure that’s a pity – Rent seems to have even less to say to an audience today than the musical that begat its genre, Hair - and nowhere near the anarchic energy of the movie that really made La Boheme sing, Moulin Rouge. But we’ll always have New York. Won’t we?
