It's a difficult movie to evaluate because it's so desperately sad in so many ways without being tragic.
Basically it's the story of a night club comic who became famous and talked himself to death. Bruce took advantage of the Beatnik subculture of the late 1950s who had pushed against obscenity and tender sensibilities enough to leave the door ajar, and then he crashed in recklessly, too self involved to realize that there are times when it's a lot better for you and everyone you care about if you just shut the hell up, that preaching, like drugs, can turn into self indulgence.
It's sad to see an essentially good-natured and well-intentioned man commit slow suicide. It's sad to watch someone throw away success with such little grace. And it's sad to know in retrospect that the director, Bob Fosse, identified so intensely with Bruce that the release of the movie was delayed for a long time while Fosse agonized over the editing.
All that aside, the film has another problem. It all seems mighty dated, as if we were viewing these Big Social Issues through the wrong end of a telescope. I guess that's not the movie's fault. It was no small matter at the time. It's just that the movies and the internet are now awash in pornography and, far worse, in gory images of heads exploding and limbs being sawed off. Hearing the F bomb spoken in front of an audience of eager adults is nothing compared to having to sit through an example of torture porn like "Unthinkable." None of the difficulty can be attributed to the principal actors either. Dustin Hoffman is fine as he slowly morphs from the ambitious kid trying to please an audience in the Borscht Belt into a self-absorbed egomaniac with glittering eyes. And Valerie Perrine is believable as his despairing junkie wife. Fosse has wisely cast Jan Miner as the optimistic and permissive Jewish mother, instead of a stereotype. She chides him about his heroin use but claps him on the back after a successful and obscene show.
Fosse's direction is sure enough. He knows what he wants to do and he does it with deliberation. There are, thank God, no dizzying, whirling camera movements, no instantaneous cuts, no sharp negative images, and no itchy electronic noise on the sound track, but mostly Miles Davis, early and late. Is there any way to resuscitate directors with that kind of style? Any way to shove the pendulum back to its former position? The structure of the film didn't exactly come from "Citizen Kane" but must have been influenced by it. Fosse was to use it again in "Star 80." There are a couple of heartbreaking moments in the film in which we watch Bruce humiliate himself by being drunk on stage and by being obstreperous in court. At any rate, they made me wince. He's so wrapped up in himself and the indignities visited on him that he can no longer take the role of the other. He doesn't know that an audience is there to be entertained, not to listen to him read aloud long sections from the trial transcript. He doesn't realize that when a sympathetic judge finally says, "Not another word," what the judge means is "not another word." Bruce's death may not have come at the worst time. He was pretty far gone, broke and inadequate to any further work. I watched an interview with him during his last year or two and he was falling all over himself and slurring his words -- worse than Truman Capote at his worst. And, having helped break the obscene sound barrier, what was there left for Bruce to do next? Invent a video game full of exploding heads?
Basically it's the story of a night club comic who became famous and talked himself to death. Bruce took advantage of the Beatnik subculture of the late 1950s who had pushed against obscenity and tender sensibilities enough to leave the door ajar, and then he crashed in recklessly, too self involved to realize that there are times when it's a lot better for you and everyone you care about if you just shut the hell up, that preaching, like drugs, can turn into self indulgence.
It's sad to see an essentially good-natured and well-intentioned man commit slow suicide. It's sad to watch someone throw away success with such little grace. And it's sad to know in retrospect that the director, Bob Fosse, identified so intensely with Bruce that the release of the movie was delayed for a long time while Fosse agonized over the editing.
All that aside, the film has another problem. It all seems mighty dated, as if we were viewing these Big Social Issues through the wrong end of a telescope. I guess that's not the movie's fault. It was no small matter at the time. It's just that the movies and the internet are now awash in pornography and, far worse, in gory images of heads exploding and limbs being sawed off. Hearing the F bomb spoken in front of an audience of eager adults is nothing compared to having to sit through an example of torture porn like "Unthinkable." None of the difficulty can be attributed to the principal actors either. Dustin Hoffman is fine as he slowly morphs from the ambitious kid trying to please an audience in the Borscht Belt into a self-absorbed egomaniac with glittering eyes. And Valerie Perrine is believable as his despairing junkie wife. Fosse has wisely cast Jan Miner as the optimistic and permissive Jewish mother, instead of a stereotype. She chides him about his heroin use but claps him on the back after a successful and obscene show.
Fosse's direction is sure enough. He knows what he wants to do and he does it with deliberation. There are, thank God, no dizzying, whirling camera movements, no instantaneous cuts, no sharp negative images, and no itchy electronic noise on the sound track, but mostly Miles Davis, early and late. Is there any way to resuscitate directors with that kind of style? Any way to shove the pendulum back to its former position? The structure of the film didn't exactly come from "Citizen Kane" but must have been influenced by it. Fosse was to use it again in "Star 80." There are a couple of heartbreaking moments in the film in which we watch Bruce humiliate himself by being drunk on stage and by being obstreperous in court. At any rate, they made me wince. He's so wrapped up in himself and the indignities visited on him that he can no longer take the role of the other. He doesn't know that an audience is there to be entertained, not to listen to him read aloud long sections from the trial transcript. He doesn't realize that when a sympathetic judge finally says, "Not another word," what the judge means is "not another word." Bruce's death may not have come at the worst time. He was pretty far gone, broke and inadequate to any further work. I watched an interview with him during his last year or two and he was falling all over himself and slurring his words -- worse than Truman Capote at his worst. And, having helped break the obscene sound barrier, what was there left for Bruce to do next? Invent a video game full of exploding heads?