How do you measure a movie?

Filed under Reviews on February 13, 2007
Keywords: movies, Rent

My wife and I watched the movie Rent last week. I had little idea what this play/movie was about before hand, but I’d heard the buzz and was interested in seeing the guy from Law & Order in a musical. I’m glad I waited until it came out on DVD, but saddened that I sacrificed a couple hours of sleep (or doing anything else) to watch it.

Rent is about a group of “starving artist” types living the bohemian life in Alphabet City (a poor neighborhood of NYC). I have no doubt the writer/director meant this story to be a message about the virtues of the lifestyles portrayed in the movie, and how love conquers all. Instead, it was a portrait of selfishness and destructive lifestyles.

Of the eight main characters, half of them had AIDS, contracted as a result of promiscuity and/or needle-sharing. The title of the movie refers to the fact that most of the characters can’t pay their rent because they don’t have jobs by choice. They are artists and won’t compromise their principles. In fact, when the filmmaker character is offered a job working for tabloid news show, his friends have to harangue him into accepting so that he and his roommate won’t be thrown out on the street, their belongings confiscated by their landlord.

I think the last straw for me was at the end of the movie when the professor character reappears after a year’s absence. He has a fistful of money gained not from employment at a university, but from a neighborhood ATM he “rewired.”

So why did I watch this movie (my wife got up in the middle and went to bed, btw)? I can’t deny the acting was good, the plot flowed smoothly and I enjoyed the musical numbers. As much as I hate rubberneckers, I have to admit this was a case of staring entranced at the scene of a wreck, waiting to see who goes to the hospital and who goes to the city morgue.

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