WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE (Warner Bros.) Starring: Larenz Tate, Halle Berry, Vivica A. Fox, Lela Rochon, Paul Mazursky. Screenplay: Tina Andrews. Producers: Paul Hall and Stephen Nemeth. Director: Gregory Nava. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 115 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I can understand why screenwriter Tina Andrews latched onto the story behind WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE for fifteen years. From a commercial standpoint, it has a great hook: the real-life story of three women who all claimed to be the legal widow of Frankie Lymon, lead singer of the 1950s doo-wop group the Teenagers (whose signature hit serves as the film's title). From a writer's standpoint, it offers the intriguing contradiction of its main character, a troubled soul who was a different man for each of his three different brides before dying of a drug overdose in 1968. It's a story with sex, drugs _and_ rock 'n' roll, as well as colorful characters a-plenty. Sure enough, this bio-pic offers loads of curb appeal.
Unfortunately, Andrews and director Gregory Nava (SELENA) make a big mistake in their approach to the material -- they decide to turn it into a rock 'n' roll RASHOMON. The framing story opens in 1986, with three women -- former Platters singer Zola Taylor (Halle Berry), petty thief and single mom Elizabeth Waters (Vivica A. Fox), and schoolteacher Emira Eagle (Lela Rochon) -- all making a legal claim to be Mrs. Frankie Lymon, with rights to his musical royalties. A hearing commences in which each claimant tells the story of Frankie (Larenz Tate) as she knew him, from teen star to has-been, from heroin addict to soldier. The flashbacks cover 13 years of Frankie's life, with widely varying perspectives on the man each of the three women married at some point, but none of them divorced.
Somewhere buried in that narrative is an interesting -- if somewhat trite -- entertainment industry life story, the story of a street kid from an abusive home who becomes dependent on the love he receives from audiences and women. Larenz Tate does a fine job of capturing Frankie's electrifying stage presence, as well as his sheer joy of performing for a crowd. In fact, the high-energy performance scenes are generally the film's best, with Frankie's unbridled on-stage enthusiasm contrasting sharply with the conservative choreography of his artistic contemporaries. Tate also has the thankless job of creating a character out of piecemeal recollections, yet the character still comes together as someone you want to know more about.
If only wanting made it so. Only occasionally does WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE hone in on the question of who Frankie Lymon really was. Too often Andrews and Nava take off on dead-end tangents -- a vamping, self-indulgent cameo by Little Richard as himself; the hit-and-run accusation that Frankie's manager/producer Morris Levy (Paul Mazursky) cheated him out of millions; broadly comic female bonding sessions which turn Zola, Elizabeth and Emira into the First, Second and Third Wives' Club. When they finally do get around to Frankie himself, they offer psychologically convenient devices like a shattered mirror in which Frankie sees his fragmented visage. The individual snapshots of his life, including such potentially provoactive subjects as his naive disregard for 1950s social conventions, never seem designed to develop into a complete portrait.
Ultimately no one, not even the three women with whom he shared a life, seems interested in understanding Frankie. That's what's most disappointing about WHY DO FOOLS FALL IN LOVE: it's not really a biography of Frankie Lymon. The film-makers are usually more interested in getting inside the the heads of the three women -- providing tart dialogue for the three talented lead actresses while making them sympathetic, mis-used you-go-girls -- than getting inside Frankie's head. Sure, they violate point of view when it serves their purpse to show things none of the narrators could have seen, but mostly they point out how Frankie's enigmatic behavior hurt others, not how he hurt himself. It's a cop-out to start telling a character's story, then shrug your shoulders and claim not to have any idea who that character is. Tina Andrews spent fifteen years waiting to tell the story of a potentially fascinating rock 'n' roll tragedy, but all she could come up with was a great big "I dunno."
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Frankies, my dear: 5.
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