Ray Pride

Chris Columbus says "Rent" is the movie he was born to make.

Not "Home Alone," not "Harry Potter" pictures, not "Mrs. Doubtfire," but "Rent." The amiable 47-year-old director says he intimately knows the time, the setting, he knows the people. In 1989, the era in which the movie version is set, he was, he says, himself living in an unheated loft, among hopefuls and the hapless, less Puccini's "La boheme" revised than Columbus' own pocket change revisited. And as the rare, full-blown movie musical, "Rent" roars, pounding away at just over two hours, with a few numbers trimmed from the "rock opera," and with a restlessly swirling, Steadicam-based shooting style.

Columbus shrugs if you ask how you go from "Harry Potter"'s childhood terrors to the adult mortality of gentrification, AIDS and burning artistic ambition of "Rent." "It's a big world out there. As a director, I honestly believe, at least for me, if I start doing the same thing over and over again, I'm going to get bored really quickly. I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. I've been waiting nine years to do this movie. I was obsessed. For various reasons, I couldn't do it. Other directors were attached to it. For me, it was really important to do this film. I was like a racehorse at the starting gate when I was finally told I could make this movie."

Larson's family didn't resist this maker of family movies. "I didn't sense that resistance from the Larsons. Certainly some people in the press..." He lets that trail. "I've always been, y'know, for some reason, I've done films that have been linked thematically by family, whether they were good films or bad films. "'Home Alone' deals with a kid who doesn't have a family. `Harry Potter,' the kid is always searching for his family. This is about a different kind of family. That's a really extreme connection, but I just felt I was the right guy to do this movie. This movie is more personal for me [than my earlier work]. I lived in Manhattan for seventeen years, I lived in a loft, I knew all these people when I was struggling at NYU--musicians, actors and writers. This was the world that I knew."

Columbus first saw "Rent" in 1996 with the original cast. "I had never experienced that kind of emotion in a theater before. I didn't realize until I was casting the film that we had three ways to go: we could cast it entirely with unknowns; the pop-star version with Justin Timberlake and Christine Aguilera; then I started to meet the original cast." He also tips the horrible, wondrous legend of the birth of "Rent" upon the death of its creator. "I realized that the thing that I responded to was the connection that they had, partially because of Jonathan Larson's death, as everyone knows, he tragically died the night before the first preview. That connected these people in a very strong way. There's a very deep connection, you're doing that play for sixteen months. There's a chemistry there as a director I'd never seen before. I met with them all, carefully considered whether they could still do it and it was that connection." (Still, "Rent" newcomer Rosario Dawson's widescreen smile and ferocious all-American features benefit the most from cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt's grimy night shooting.)

The New York of "Rent" is a composite of backlot and various cities. "Unfortunately, New York City has become a bit like Disneyland now," Columbus says. "The line in the film, `I'm a New Yorker, fear is my life,' that's my seventeen years here, my motto every day. But to recreate Alphabet City of the late eighties [would be] almost akin to doing a Western. You go down there now, there's Starbucks, wireless Internet cafes, DVD stores. We had to pick and choose our locations."

But this final work from Larson, a man who jokingly called himself "the future of American musical theater," still resounds. When I saw the movie last week, the audience was partly reviewers and journalists but mostly enthusiastic teenagers who, from the start of the movie, were audibly thrilled. Throughout the screening, their appreciation was raucous and loud even at higher-volume numbers. As the end credits rolled, a couple dozen stood, lingered, as everyone else filed out. Mostly girls, some guys, most with eyes closed, they swayed as they mouthed the lyrics perfectly. At the very end of "Rent," after the copyright notice, there's a final credit as the anthem, "Seasons of Love" ends, and it seemed that everyone looked toward the screen at just that moment and as they read the words--"Thank you, Jonathan Larson"--a short, sharp intake of breath was all you could hear, and as one, they bowed their heads reverently. Ah, here is the audience that deserves and will reward many, many more future movie musicals of every possible style.

"Rent" is now playing.

(2005-11-21)

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