Mark Rydell (1979)
A frequent criticism of the star actresses in successful musical films of recent years – Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross – is that they lack a ‘middle range’. This is a criticism of their emotional repertoire rather than their vocal skills: to adapt Dorothy Parker’s famous putdown of Katharine Hepburn, they run the gamut of emotions from A (domineering dynamism) to Z (all-stops-out vulnerability) but with nothing in between. Bo Goldman and Bill Kerby’s script for The Rose pre-empts such criticism of the film’s star, Bette Midler – by failing to supply her with any situations in which a middle range might be of use. In the last weeks of her life, the rock superstar Mary Rose Foster – known as Rose or ‘the Rose’, and supposedly based on Janis Joplin – fluctuates between desperate, voracious euphoria and, much more often, violent despair. Although the rapid shifts between these two states of mind are startling at first, they’re so frequent that you don’t even notice if Rose’s mood switches accelerate as her mental stability diminishes. By halfway through The Rose (which runs just over two hours), they’re as much a part of the movie as the four sides of the screen.
The Rose begins and ends with a gathering of Rose’s bereaved family. Within this framing, the story is one big flashback to the events leading up to her death. Mark Rydell and the screenwriters thus jettison the comfy conventional structure of musical biopics: Rose is in such a bad way from the outset that Bette Midler has no need, or opportunity, to develop the character gradually. To Middler’s credit, she does occasionally evoke a younger Rose – when a flash of the tense, ingratiating high-school kid she once was breaks through the dazed smile of the woman she’s become. And the film-makers do sometimes resort to biopic cliché to crank up the action – for example, a sequence that sees Rose taunted and, as a result, galvanised by a hard-boiled roadie. The flatness and repetitiveness of The Rose, although it’s hardly conducive to dramatic excitement, may well be intentional – it is conducive to making Bette Midler stand out. With hardly anything going around her, all the life in the film is thanks to its star and Midler is lively, to put it mildly. It’s probably fair to say that no one else could have delivered what she delivers in The Rose yet her portrait of Rose is passionately incoherent (it’s not a defence to say this is because the character she’s playing has these qualities). The performance is raw in bad ways as well as good: there are times when you can practically hear the shout of ‘Action!’ because you can see Midler start to act. Mark Rydell keeps the camera close up on her – and exclusively her – too often. As a result, Midler performs powerfully but in a vacuum. The other actors seem to be not fully participating but merely and minimally reacting to her.
The film has plenty of things to recommend it, though. There are memorable images, such as Rose traversing acres of seats in an empty stadium, in panicky pursuit of her manager. There’s a sharp illustration of the primacy of being a winner in American culture when Rose’s home town, the ethos of which she’s rebelled against so vigorously, gives her a returning heroine’s welcome. (The counterpoint within this episode – a shopkeeper who used to sell Rose sweets and now sells her records doesn’t recognise her – is too obvious, though.) Bette Midler conveys persuasively Rose’s infantilism – her desire for protection and attention, her determination to have her own way. She tells her audiences that ‘you’re part of my family’ but a shot of a mass of indistinguishable figures tells you that Rose is deluding herself. Her professional success brings her attention without protection and sharpens her need for the latter, encourages but doesn’t gratify her childishness. As the stadiums get bigger, Rose’s insecurity and desperation increase too. The audience fervour and the huge illuminated Rose-and-rose logo at her concerts (her name in lights and a giant neon flower) combine to suggest an adoration comparable to worship of a religious or political figurehead. A religiously-flavoured postscript comes with the film’s title song, played over the closing credits. In tempo and orchestration, ‘The Rose’, by Amanda McBroom, calls to mind ‘The Way We Were’ and Bette Midler’s switch to tuneful plaintiveness for the number suggests Streisand, without emulating her. But the strong, regular rhythm and limited melody also give the song the concentration of a hymn tune. Lyrics like ‘For the man who’s scared of dying/Never ever learns to live’ carry hymnal echoes too.
The title song is the only original composition for the film. The other numbers are mainly standards (‘Stay With Me Baby’, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’) rather than the unmistakeable property of a particular artist. Perhaps it’s because they’re borrowed that the rock environment of Rose’s story feels attenuated. There’s barely a mention of any contemporaries or rivals and Rose’s fan base is socially and ethnically various: I think this is in order to present her as Everystar but it also detracts from the sense of a real world. Mark Rydell, Bo Goldman and Bill Kerby seem determined to synthesise rock fact and fiction and thereby create a definitive late 1960s rock icon biography but this is often clumsily done. Rose has a humiliating encounter with Billy Ray (Harry Dean Stanton) and the other members of a C&W band whose songs she’s been performing but it’s not clear why she meets with them in the first place. Her slogan ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (now actually appropriated in Britain, with a greater sense of irony, by Ian Dury) is too obvious a summary of received ideas of the elemental forces of the rock universe. Rose’s lesbian relationship may be inspired by Janis Joplin’s biography but it feels like a required part of the messed-up superstar package. It might have been more effective if the film had shown Rose acting on lesbian impulses in a more casual way – say, with one of the members of her tour entourage. The relationship she has is made too ‘meaningful’. It’s so glossily tender that it undercuts Rose’s flagrant insecurity.
Rose’s affair with Houston Dyer, a limousine driver who tells her he’s an AWOL army sergeant, is more interesting. In a movie in which the supporting roles might seem doomed to go unnoticed, Frederic Forrest is well cast as Houston and registers strongly. Forrest has an unfinished look about him (especially with the terrible haircut he has here). He also has the ability to project a social immaturity that people in the world of The Rose will interpret as simple stupidity: her acolytes tell Rose that Houston is just a dim hanger-on. Forrest’s finely modulated facial expressions (particularly what he does with his eyes) suggest a quick, tentative intelligence concealed by a slow tongue. The scriptwriters spoil the effect somewhat by giving Houston occasional lines that stick out as things he wouldn’t say (like ‘I think people who use the third person narrative are loony tunes’) but Forrest provides as good a foil to Bette Midler as Mark Rydell’s relentless concentration on the lead will allow. Two actors in bit parts are startlingly vivid: David Keith, as an excitable Green Beret whom Rose picks up as a ‘bodyguard’, and the man playing a bar-prop whose brain has disappeared but whose nerves are still showing[1].
The only major flaw in the casting is Alan Bates as Rose’s overweight, going-to-seed manager, Rudge Campbell. Bates isn’t bad when Campbell engages in nervy diplomacy to try and cajole his valuable commodity into producing the lucrative goods but his self-consciousness counterfeits nearly every other scene in which he appears. In a long tracking shot of backstage activity, he’s acting in total isolation from everyone else in the frame. Alan Bates seldom gets deep into a role and is less able than many to overcome miscasting. Sometimes, his body below the neck can contrast interestingly with the main impression that his face nearly always gives, of thinking about the part he’s playing. (He was very effective as the witty, earthy painter in An Unmarried Woman.) I guess he’s in The Rose because he’s a reasonably big international name and because Rose’s manager is meant to be English but Bates’s London accent isn’t good. The character of Campbell is so thinly written – he’s a heartless user who treats Rose like a human being only when he has a transparent ulterior motive – that it’s nothing if the actor in the role isn’t mesmerising. It might have been better to cast someone smaller and more rat-like: Alan Bates’s good looks are pointless here and he’s utterly lacking in vicious dynamism.
[1980s]
[1] Postscript: I’ve not been able to identify this character, or therefore the actor, on IMDB.
