54
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Miramax Films Director: Mark Christopher Writer: Mark Christopher Cast:Mike Meyers, Neve Campbell, Ryan Phillipe, Salma Hayek, Sela Ward, Breckin Meyer, Sherry Stringfield, Lauren Hutton
Would you believe that disco is dead? The clubs with long lines of people who had to beg the bouncers to admit them; the pulsating music that took the hordes of young far from their daily troubles; the throbbing rhythms that propelled John Travolta into stardom with his great film "Saturday Night Fever," now a mere historical curiosity making way for his darker, more cynical works. It's gone the way of the cha cha. Or has it? In the final scene of "The Last Days of Disco," last year's meditation on the dance phenomenon, writer-director Whit Stillman gets a contemporary subway car to its feet, passenger by passenger rising to boogie, then an entire station on the New York transit swinging to the beat. If the clubs are boarded up or metamorphosed into shopping centers filled with stores like P.C. Richard and Kmart, the music in our minds remains, a lasting tribute to the 1980s phenomenon that captured youthful hearts and minds throughout the west.
This introduction might serve as a model of what a movie about the country's most notable disco should elicit by its conclusion: an excitement in the audience, a feeling that, "Hey, the music, the dancing were great! Maybe we'll come to our senses and revive the delirium that defined the era?" Unfortunately Mark Christopher, who wrote and directed "54," is not sure what he wants to do with the material. Loosely constructed as a series of incidents in the life of a rising young protege of "54" impresario Steve Rubell, Mr. Christopher's movie at times looks like a parody of the era, at other times like a celebration of a period haplessly gone by. Trash bags full of money turn up from time to time with only a smidgen of evidence of how this much cash changed hands, but most important the film does not make clear exactly how its narrator and central character rose from a New Jersey working-class boy to a semi-celebrity of New York's nightly social scene. There is an a hint of how his sexual chemistry gave him all the push he needed to transform his life. No sooner does any sensuality hit the screen than Alexander Gruszynski's camera pans away to introduce the next vignette.
The fictionalized story of how Studio 54 changes the life of one young man opens in a small New Jersey town just three miles across the water from the Manhattan which few of its residents seem ever to visit. When 19-year-old Shane O'Shea (Ryan Phillippe), his curly blond hair newly coiffed by some small-town Vidal Sassoon, hitches a ride across the river with two friends, he finds himself just outside the entrance of the famed Studio 54 where Steve Rubell (Mike Myers) himself, aided by a bouncer, makes careful picks as to who gets admitted. When Shane gets the thumbs up and his two friends dismissed, we get the earliest hint of a chemistry between him and Mr. Rubell. Asked to remove his shirt to display the body of Michelangelo's David (according to one female admirer) he ascends the hierarchy to bartender and it is in that position that he, by adding assorted pills to the patrons' drinks and by performing services not clearly defined by the movie, begins to acquire heavy cash with his growing fame. But he never quite loses his working-class roots and in one case, at a Park Avenue party, he becomes the butt of jokes by patronizing richniks, one of whom calls him a troglodyte (which Shane thinks is a compliment).
Shane's female side, Julie Black (Neve Campbell), is a soap-opera performer eager, like Shane, to use whatever charms she has to rise in her career, obviously not stopping at the bedpost on the way to the ladder. In her case just as in his, director Christopher barely hints at the intrigue as though he wants to give Shane and Julie the benefit of the doubt--to allow us to assume that pure looks and bauble were enough to make their calling a success.
Nor do we get to see much dancing. Compare "54" with "Dance With Me" for an indication of how a story--not necessary a great one--can feature both hot dancing and a semblance of chemistry from its stars. For all of Ryan Phillippe's good looks, he is oddly uncharismatic, and Mike Myers, in portraying a man who electrified the disco scene like no other in his time, performs the role as a man perpetually on downers.
Rated R. Running time: 89 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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