Clint Eastwood's 'Jersey Boys'

I was present at the birth of rock 'n' roll: Elvis, Motown, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Cream, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and the Four Seasons.

The Four Seasons' first hit was "Sherry," and it was played on a 45 rpm record player that was the size of carry-on luggage. It was a #1 hit when #1 hits were heard everywhere all the time. If you were alive in the USA in the fall of 1962, you heard that song, every day.

Just a bunch of guys

At that time, I hung on a corner with a bunch of guys. We were never a gang — we were just a bunch of guys who hung out on the same corner in South Philly: Bonsall and Snyder, or B&S. All of us had the same favorite group, the Four Seasons, until those four lads from Liverpool came along and suddenly there was a problem.

Some of us liked the Beatles, and some of us continued to like the Four Seasons. It was a split in musical tastes that mirrored a nationwide split. There was even an album released entitled The Beatles vs. the Four Seasons.

Most of the girls we knew favored the mop tops. So did I. Maybe one had something to do with the other — whatever the reason, I became a lifelong Beatles fan, although there was always a place in my musical heart for my first love. I have their greatest hits on my iPod.

In the fall of 2004, a friend told me he had just seen a show in previews on the West Coast that he thought was going to be a big hit. What he liked about it was that it told a story you thought you knew but didn’t. It was a fine play apart from the music — and the music was great. Jersey Boys.

Somehow, over the course of the next decade, I managed to avoid seeing Jersey Boys, not on purpose. All of my friends saw it, and even those whose musical loyalties had changed said it was a great show. It won a slew of awards: a Tony for Best Musical, a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album, and an Olivier for Best New Musical in London.

Jersey Boys, the movie, follows the rise of the Four Seasons from small-time local band (whose members are also inept part-time crooks) to national stardom. The story is told mostly by one band member, Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), a wiseguy wannabe who starts a band and has the savvy to recruit Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young) as lead singer. The plot is formulaic — they struggle, they rise, they argue, they fall.

Missing the point

What is missing is any real feel for the times or for the impact that the Four Seasons had musically on 1960s American culture. For example, everybody started a band in the '60s. My buddies formed one, the Seltaebs (I’ll let you guess what side of the Beatles vs. Four Seasons divide they fell on), and a few were just as good as — or better than — the Four Lovers, one of many names that the Four Seasons used before fame and fortune.

The key to success for the Four Seasons was when Joe Pesci (Joseph Russo) — yes, that Joe Pesci — introduced the band to Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), a songwriter of exceptional talent. A band doesn’t make it playing the hit songs of the day; a successful band makes it by creating its own hit songs. Gaudio writes "Sherry" and goes on to pen a series of hits that make the Four Seasons one of music’s most successful groups.

But the telling of this bar band to star band tale lacks any sense of context or drama. The Beatles and the British invasion are never mentioned, nor is the rise of Motown or any of the other dozen or so musical explosions of the '60s.

Instead we have, in Hollywood parlance, Annie Hall meets Goodfellas meets A Star is Born. (Marshall Brickman, the cowriter of this script, also cowrote Annie Hall, and director Clint Eastwood has long been working on another remake of A Star is Born).

Do the math

But in art, 1+1+1 don't always add up to 3. In the case of Jersey Boys, it doesn't add up at all. The pacing is a mess. There is a long story about the three original members going in and out of jail followed by the meet-up with Gaudio and the long ride up the pop musical ladder to a big hit song. Along the way, we meet a sentimental mafia don (Christopher Walken), a tough but savvy local girl whom Valli marries (Renée Marino) — he wants to change his real name (Castelluccio) to Valley, but she convinces him to stay Italian with Valli — a driven producer (Mike Doyle, lighting up every scene he's in as Bob Crewe), and an assortment of secondary characters who are so obviously plot devices that they could wear name tags: caring Mom, clueless Dad, heartless club owner, fed-up-with-always-being-second lover, and so on.

There are a couple of nice moments, like Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" with a small group on stage, then the curtain opens and a Count Basie-like band transports the simple ballad into snap finger heaven. But the good moments are offset by the bad and even ugly moments. Great songs are introduced by interspersing shots of the boys performing with adoring young girls bobbing their heads and swaying with the music as they look adoringly at our stars — gee, that's as original as Jersey politicians getting indicted.

Eastwood's feel for the music is just out to lunch: He has Valli sing "My Eyes Adored You" as a lullaby to his young daughter. The lines are "My eyes adored you / Though I never laid a hand on you / My eyes adored you" — that was just plain ugly. Things get uglier when the boys show up 25 years later to be inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame: The makeup looks like it was done by Count Dracula. Unforgivable.

The big message of the movie is that loyalty is everything to the boys from Jersey, as Valli sacrifices his career to save a fellow band member. The problem is that there is no loyalty to the music. It is only at the end of the movie that Valli talks about his love for the music — four guys standing on a corner with nothing but their voices and talent to make a magical musical moment.

And as he says that, the movie turns into what it should have been through its first 130 minutes: a joyous romp. They break out of the claustrophobic Eastwood semi-drama and become what this movie could have been — fun. The entire cast shows up to dance to and sing one of the Seasons' best tunes, "Oh What A Night."

Yes, these guys came from the wrong side of the track and were anything but wholesome young lads, but they had their music, and great music is the one thing that can make any life shine. It could have made Jersey Boys explode on the screen, instead of fizzle.