Now, I’ve heard great things about the theatrical production of Rent. Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to see it. This script was about as energetic and engaging as flossing. And you really need to pay attention if you want to get all of that plaque. So I guess, it’s actually LESS engaging than fighting gingivitis.
The script reads like a lab report to me. There’s a lot of technical information in this one. When contrasted against the Miami Vice script I reviewed, it’s very dry. Miami Vice was florid and overwritten, but it held my attention. I tried to read this script about eight times and it just got harder and harder. I’m not a big Chris Columbus to begin with, so that didn’t help matters. I don’t know if it’s just his style here or if he’s trying to be really faithful to the original. If it’s the latter, then I can’t fault him too much. That’s what killed his Harry Potter films for me. He spent too much time being faithful to the books and not enough time thinking about making the movie work. That’s another review altogether.
In Rent, Columbus takes great pains to jam a lot of information the script. I can only assume this is faithful, because no one would cram this much into a single movie unless they were afraid of leaving something out. For example, there’s a scene where one of the characters is confronted with something very personally horrific. The scene as I imagine it would be very moody and tense. It takes up about five lines at the bottom of a page. There is an economy to this form of writing that I can get behind. Being a director, Columbus doesn’t need to waste time writing down descriptions since he probably has a good idea how he’s going to film it already in his head. I’ve encountered similar methods in comic books where writer/artists tend to write very bare, dry outlines instead of full scripts because they already know what they’re going to do. Why waste the time? So the dryness of the script probably stems more from Columbus saving himself the trouble of writing it all out.
With that in mind, why bother reading the script at all, really. It’s full and pretty solid. The story’s good, but I can’t give him credit for that. No, this is an endeavor I can only, truly appreciate in its finished form. With the Watchmen and Miami Vice scripts, I got a sense that the script was a selling point. That the story was being sold to me as a reader. In this case, it’s almost like an afterthought, and I can’t even blame the guy who wrote it. From what I gather, this could be a very good movie from a very dry script.
Take that for what it’s worth.
Steven Dougherty stacks boxes all day long now. It’s not very satisfying and sometimes he looks at his box-cutter like it could solve all of his problems in a few strokes.
