film | Bohemian crapsody

However much of a subversive-issue-embracing, critical-rave-garnering, Pulitzer-and-Tony-winning smash it was at the time of its 1996 stage debut, the cinematic adaptation of Jonathan Larson's RENT is a big old self-important nightmare, so overwhelmingly garish and boisterous it makes Moulin Rouge look like a Lars Von Trier film. For a production that's supposed to epitomize creative passion and youthful exhuberance — the story: early-20s bohemians in New York's East Village with no discernable income back(jazz)hand the archaic, the conservative and the sell-outs by displaying their artistic individuality in song-and-dance numbers that name-drop Pablo Neruda and Getrude Stein, for God's sake — the movie smacks of lethargic desperation. It's as if the "rock opera" label often applied to Rent is merely a polite way to say "painfully awkward musical."

Famous for blockbuster franchises that sold themselves (Home Alone and Harry Potter), director Chris Columbus isn't incompetent, but his typically anonymous, point-and-shoot approach to filmmaking doesn't provide Rent with an identity (or even a pulse) of its own. In an admittedly audacious decision, Columbus retains six of the show's original players in lieu of hiring big stars with marquee clout. But it backfires, as these mid-30s actors — Anthony Rapp (as a jilted documentarian), Adam Pascal (a mopey rocker), Idina Menzel (a flirtatious protest artist) and Wilson Jermaine Heredia (a saintly drag queen) among them — now look at least a decade too old to be prancing around in The Gap's urban hipster collection and warbling about their ambitions, fears and dreams in flat vocals that'd probably get them canned by the American Idol judge's panel only a verse or two into their auditions. These folks don't need to be on par with Pavarotti, true, but in a movie as wall-to-wall grating as Rent, it's another nit to pick.

As for the whole Broadway component, maybe Larson's compositions — unarguably well-intentioned and obviously deepy personal — have a totally different effect in a live-theater venue where the performance is immediately encompassing and doesn't feel as forced or phony. Here, the late playwright's lyrics ("Sodomy / It's between God and me") are absorbed into the movie's clunky-sham aura, the power ballads sound eye-rollingly maudlin, and the sprawling odes to non-conforminty resemble Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" rewritten by pretentious liberal-arts students. During all the indie posturing and fist-in-the-air anthem-belting, the characters face gritty obstacles — traumatic pasts, drug addiction, economic uncertainty, illness and death (or, as the Rent spoof in Team America: World Police succinctly put it, "AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! Everybody has AIDS!") — but don't bother actually caring about any of this pap. Rent is extra enamored with itself so you don't have to be. F