All That Jazz

I've briefly mentioned All That Jazz a couple of times in conjunction with my not getting a recording of it on my DVR to do a review on here. One time the recording was interrupted; one time I just plain forgot to set the DVR, and so on. But TCM ran it again as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and this time I got a good recording of to do a post on.

Roy Scheider plays Joe Gideon, a stage and screen director who is clearly modeled on the movie's director, Bob Fosse. Gideon is working himself to an early grave, as we can see from his morning routine of eye drops for his bleary eyes, chain-smoking, and stimulant pills. During the day, he's got two projects he's working on. One is directing a stage play, which we see starting from the mass auditions, before it eventually gets to choreographing the musical numbers. This includs Audrey (Leland Palmer), who is Gideon's ex-wife, the two also having a precocious daughter together, Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi in her only screen appearance).

Also, Gideon is working on the editing of a movie called The Stand-Up, which even more than the musical is a reflection of Fosse's real life when he was directing and editing the movie Lenny about the comic Lenny Bruce. The comic in the movie does a routine on death, riffing on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' then recent "five stages of grief". It's fairly clear even if you didn't already know the plot that this is a metaphor for Gideon's own mortality; indeed, we see one brief shot of him with an oxygen mask.

And then there's Gideon's personal life. I mentioned that he has an ex-wife, but he's also got a girlfriend, the dancer Kate (Ann Reinking), who gets along well with Michelle with the two of them doing a dance number to "Everything Old is New Again" for Joe at one point. Meanwhile, Joe is keenly aware of his own mortality, as he has dream sequences with the hazily-photographed Angelique (Jessica Lange).

Eventually, that mortality catches up with him in a big way, as he starts having attacks of severa angina that are a symptom of a pending heart attack. The doctors tell him that he's going to need bypass surgery, something that was pretty risky in the mid-1970s and is going to require an extended period of convalescence. This puts the Broadway show in jeopardy, and the producers learn that, paradoxically, they would be better off financially if Joe dies and they have to cancel the show as that's the one way they'll get the insurance bond.

Joe goes through the surgery, but during the convalescence he begins to have more and more vivid dreams, all set to elaborate musical numbers, about the possibility that he is in fact going to die I'll stop there, as I don't want to reveal the ending.

In reading about All that Jazz, I found that my initial thoughts mirrored what I was reading. There are some reviews that praise the movie very highly. Bob Fosse unsurprisingly has inspired direction and choreogarphy, while Roy Scheider is excellent as Bob's alter ego Joe Gordon. Both of them were nominated for Oscars, among the many nominations it received. And it's pretty darn easy to see on watching the film why it got so many nominations and why it gets some extremely positive review.

However, there are other people who call the movie self-indulgent at best and muddled at worst. And this is something I can understand too. It took a while to figure out exactly what was going on with Angelique, as well as figuring out which of the musical numbers were real and what was part of a dream sequence being all in Joe's head. It doesn't help that some people are going to find Joe Gideon to be a less than sympathetic character. There's also the insular world of Broadway. I'm not a particular fan of Broadway, so I always see movies like this as being a sort of outsider looking in as opposed to the center of the universe.

So I think in the end that All the Jazz is the sort of movie that's going to divide opinion very sharply. And that's the sort of thing that makes it even more necessary that you watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.