NEWSIES
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
NEWSIES is a film directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega. The songs are by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman. It stars Christian Bale, David Moscow, Luke Edwards, Robert Duvall, and Ann-Margaret. It is rated PG for mature themes.
NEWSIES is a live-action musical from Walt Disney. After Disney's recent successes with animated musicals, also featuring Alan Menken as co-composer, no doubt encouraged Disney to try to revive this mostly moribund genre. The result is a thorough enjoyable renewal of one of my favorite forms.
The story is based on an historical strike of newsboys, newsies, in New York City in 1899 against Joseph Pulitzer. There is, despite the irony of Disney's own anti-union history, a moral quality behind the leaping, flips, splits, and jumps that characterize the choreography, a protest against the exploitation of children and the anyone helpless in the face of money and power. There's a lot of uplift in this musical, so watch out.
The music is excellent. It advances the story rather than interrupting it, it is tuneful, if you will, and it avoids both the cliches of Andrew Lloyd Weber pseudo-operas and MTV dance videos. The director, Kenny Ortega, took on a big job in staging and filming several very large, busy production numbers; this is his first directing job, having been a choreographer only before, and some awkwardness is inevitably apparent. But still, he is more to be praised than cavilled. It is by and large very impressive technically and artistically.
The dance numbers are energetic, even athletic, as befits a cast of young boys and teenagers, and heavily populated. Christian Bale has one solo dance number, which is charming and surprisingly good, with smaller gestures and its own narrative vocabulary than the big production numbers. The performances are delivered with a fine conviction, a purity, that won me over from the opening number.
Christian Bale, by the way, is the wonderful boy star of Stephen Spielberg's EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987), who is mostly grown up to a talented manhood now. He is still a master of the mixed message, being at once vulnerable and malevolent. He backed up by David Moscow, a more conventional kind of star, but still quite appealing in his own way. Robert Duvall shows up sporting a patently false beard as Joseph Pulitzer, whom Duvall brings to life through his vast and perceptive treasury of shtick; in this case, Duvall accents Pulitzer's Jewishness with a perhaps distracting repertoire of gestures right out of I REMEMBER MAMA. Of course, even Duvall can only do so much with a script that largely reduces Pulitzer to two-dimensional villain. The show is rife with juicy villains and they provide a lot of the fun.
One should also mention the appearance of Ann-Margaret as Medda the Swedish Meadowlark. She has a couple of numbers and gets to strut her stuff behind a purple ostrich fan.
On the technical side, a side I am barely competent to even refer to, one has to be impressed by the detailed and authentic-looking sets and costumes of fin-de-siecle New York, especially the Lower East Side. But especially stunning are the mattes, especially one of the Brooklyn Bridge that so amazing that it gets its own credit. Surely, it will be remembered next Oscartide.
Disney deserves a lot of thanks for taking on the risking business of reviving the live musical and in doing it in such a grand manner. It is not without reason that one of the persons particularly remembered in the credits, along with Howard Ashman (Menken's late partner), is Gene Kelly.
I'm not saying the film is perfect, especially in the editing and shooting of the dance scenes. I am saying it's pretty darn good and better than anything that's come along in a long while in this genre.
If you like musicals, you will like NEWSIES, and you will gladly pay whatever it takes to see it. If you don't think you do like them, you might want to risk a matinee ticket and give this one a try. It might very well surprise you. It did me.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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