Eastwood: Jersey Boys (2014)

For someone who has devoted so much of his career to music, Clint Eastwood has tended to stay away from musicals. With the exception of Paint Your Wagon, he has never appeared in a musical, nor directed a musical, despite helming several musical biopics and documentaries and composing the scores to a good third of his films. Jersey Boys changes all that, but it feels more familiar than might be expected – either Eastwood has made the transition to musicals remarkably seamlessly (he took up the project because his plans to remake A Star Is Born fell through), or he has somehow been making his own kind of musical all along, depending on how you look at it.  In any case, his tribute to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons probably has more in common with, say, Bird than with the hit stage musical that inspired it – in his hands, these iconic songs never quite break free of the narrative, never quite mutate into self-sufficient set pieces. If anything, they’re weighed down by his late classicist palette, which is even more sombre than usual, anchored by bright, occlusive light sources in the extreme foreground that relegate the Four Seasons to an almost inscrutable remoteness. That’s not to say that it’s dark per se, or that it doesn’t revel in the joy of their music, but that Eastwood wraps them so tightly in his perennial bars, saloons and back rooms that it feels as if the film has to make a conscious effort to remember them. For that reason, the meditations on mortality – and masculinity – feel a little more pointed and personal than in Eastwood’s recent films, from the glimpse of Rawhide that presides over one of the most memorable scenes, to an epilogue that paints 1990 as part of the same almost-black-and-white world. By the same token, it’s fascinating to see how Eastwood handles pop stars who were undoubtedly the pinnacle of machismo in their day, but who seem to have been quite emasculated and even effeminised by history. For every plastic Jersey accent, every Goodfellas-esque address to the audience – Joe Pesci helped form the Four Seasons, and is a character in the film – there’s a new trill to Frankie’s high-pitched squeal, which remains perpetually startling for being couched in such a swaggering context. Unlike the stage production, then, Eastwood hasn’t made it his ambition to rescue the Four Seasons from datedness, or to exploit their datedness for a new demographic – he simply accepts it, and that gives the film an extraordinary dignity and poise.