“I wuz dancin’ wit’ da fella, ya know?”
to hear the review
There is something very tiresome about the accents in Saturday Night Fever. There is a place in movies for the tough-guy Brooklyn accent, but few directors do it exceptionally well. There’s Scorcese, and then…there’s…uh, let’s say Scorcese. Maybe Abel Ferrara. But in a movie like Saturday Night Fever doesn’t age all that well, and the Brooklyn tough-guy thing these characters do is not only obnoxious after a while, it feels totally put-on by every single character. Of course, they are actors, and they probably are faking the accent, but the whole idea that we shouldn’t be noticing.
Saturday Night Fever was a huge hit in 1977, grossing more than 100 million dollars at the box office. It was a marketing triumph at the time because of its soundtrack - the Bee Gees sold crazy numbers of their disco soundtrack, which drove people to the movie in droves, which then drove people back to the record store for the soundtrack. The Bee Gees became huge, disco became huge, John Travolta became huge and this movie was huge. But that was 1977. This is 2009. And very little about the movie is still relevant or poignant. If you like the dancing, you might want to pick up the Blu-Ray edition of the film, out May 5th from Paramount Home Entertainment. My girlfriend likes the dancing, and she went straight to the special features to follow along with the dance-like-Travolta tutorial.
Watching the Travolta tutorial, though, I was struck by how easy much of the dancing in the film really was. Now, I am no dancer, and I would not suggest that I could compete with a Christopher Walken or a John Travolta on screen. But sitting down to watch this movie I was looking forward to the dancing because that’s all one hears about, when one hears about this movie. And one rarely hears about this movie any more. And…I was not impressed! It’s just people wiggling a little, and moving their hands around. I haven’t yet seen a single episode of Dancing With The Stars, but I can only surmise that if any of those contestants came up with a dance that looked like this, they would not last through the first episode.
I’m ovbiously not the target audience for this movie. But really, it doesn’t work on a lot of levels. First of all, the movie contains absolutely no sympathetic characters. None. John Travolta and his buddies are all callous, self-absorbed, deluded jerks. Except for his one friend who has knocked up a girl and is a whiny scared douchebag. The girls are either mean-spirited braggarts or fawning idiots. Travolta’s family is sullen and sour, and the only character that comes close to eliciting some sympathy is his brother, who has just left the priesthood. So I’m watching these awful people do awful things to each other, inhabiting a world where degradation is presented as routine, and violence is the inevitable result of even the smallest amount of anger or even discomfort.
Only at the very end of the film is this entirely artificial world laid bare, and only then does the grittiness that underlies the bulk of Saturday Night Fever come through in an obvious way. The problem with that is that it made me like every one of the characters even less. Maybe in the 70s, these kids struck a chord with audiences, and people could identify in some way. But no more. Now I’m just watching an extremely well-filmed and well-constructed movie, which looks terrific in HD, and thinking about how much the fake Brooklyn accent annoys me, how little the dancing impresses me, and how much I hate all the people I’m watching. Saturday Night Fever is a classic, and deservedly so, but it just doesn’t translate to 2009.
