Jersey Boys

Despite being an adaptation of someone else’s musical stage show, Jersey Boys emerges a very personal Clint Eastwood film. In particular it recalls the themes of his most personal and powerful film, Unforgiven.

As the four members of the group slip outside their scene to address the audience directly, the film treats memory and the collision of its participants’ different perspectives. Detailing the group’s tensions, their personal and collective failures and resurrections, the film also replays the gap between the legend and the reality. The love songs pour out of characters who don’t meet the responsibilities inherent in love.

As usual Eastwood explores the male world — the fraternity of boys, pranksters, partiers and betrayers and the high price the women pay for the men to stay free. Frankie tells his mistress how important his wife and family are to him but we witness his neglect, his wife’s consequent disintegration and his loss of his daughters. His marriage begins with his seduction at first sight by wiseacre Mary, who tells him to find a nickel: “Call your mother, you’re going to be home late.” He will disappoint the once frivolous Mary’s sense of family responsibility.  

The investigation of manhood is explicitly focused in Frankie Valli’s sacrifices to meet his — albeit partial, non-familial — ethical code and in the group’s song Walk Like a Man. The group’s hardass mobster patron weeps at his mother’s favourite song. The gay producer is unquestioningly accepted at a time “when people thought Liberace was just theatrical.” The musicians live the same kind of demanding code that the gangsters here do and as the heroes of Eastwood’s cop and cowboy morality plays do. The prize lyricist is celebrated for losing his virginity — which starts with the woman turning off the TV show, Rawhide, starring a young Clint Eastwood. For the character to become a man, that is, the director’s younger self is revived but to be turned off. 

That moment anticipates the smash finale, where Oh What a Night is performed by the whole cast, including wives, girlfriends, bit players, and even the old song and dance man himself, Christopher Walken (see Hardass Mobster above), as they appeared earlier, i.e., younger. In fact, art — whether the recorded songs or the movie or their legend — makes them eternally young. Performers may age and even die but their art gives them a kind of immortality — like the legendary survival of Bill Munney in the rumoured form of San Francisco merchant. Whatever happened to old Bill Munney, even the much older young Rowdy Yates lives on. The grey-haired singers reunite for their Hall of Fame concert and without rehearsal slip into their old routine — which recovers their younger images. Thanks to Eastwood’s familiar meticulous sense of detail, the buried past social reality is also brought back to convincing life.

As in the traditional musical biopic the songs are made to grow out of the characters’ emotional experiences and tribulations. That is, they are not just constructions but pointed expressions. Frankie Valli brings new depth and emotional breadth to the composer of Short Shorts, Bob Gaudio. In the continuing dance between art and life, Steven Schirripa’s appearance as a barber evokes The Sopranos, in which Frankie Valli enjoyed an afterlife as a non-singing character. Actor Joe Pesci is portrayed as a hustling talent agent, who later employs the group’s destructive Tommy Devito. 
     Finally, the film often shades into poetry. Perhaps its liveliest metaphor pops up in the early heist scene. The lads shove a huge, heavy safe into a car trunk. Its weight lifts the front wheels off the ground as the car screams off into a shop window. That image — a speeding car with the front wheels high off the ground — is a perfect emblem for Frankie Valli’s brilliant falsetto career. He sings high but propelled — which eventually saves him from the life of crime and failure that scene emblematizes.