If ever a movie blew its big chance, it’s “54.”
Who would have thought that a Miramax studio picture about Studio 54, trendiest and most glamor-drenched New York City dance club of the high disco era of the ’70s, would wind up being drab, dull and corny? That it would turn into a ridiculous hunky-young-man-on-the-rise morality tale, with star Ryan Philippe floundering shirtlessly through his lead role as Shane O’Shea, 19-year-old Jersey Adonis turned Studio 54 busboy-bartender — and apparent apple of co-owner Steve Rubell’s eye?
Beyond that, who would have predicted that the picture’s only near-triumph — other than the super-catchy recycled disco on the soundtrack — would lie not in decor or atmosphere, but in a surprisingly convincing dramatic performance by comedian Mike Myers as Rubell? Here, Myers takes the sleazy smile and lubricious self-love of his Austin Powers character and plays it partly for pathos.
Most of all, who could have guessed that a movie about a swanky anything-goes-after-midnight club — so committed to hedonism that the guests, including world-famous celebrities, made love on the premises — would wind up being, comparatively, skittish about sex?
The late ’70s world of sexual abandon, chic drug use and celebrity craze is “54’s” subject. After all, the things movies are usually good at include glamor, glitz, sexual tease. But “54,” in which we see the real last days of disco, is an appallingly bad movie. Nothing in it works well, except Myers and, more frequently, the old disco tracks and newly performed songs, especially the great disco ballads like Thelma Houston’s hair-raising “Don’t Leave Me This Way.”
As we watch Shane travel through 10 separate nights at the disco from the summer of ’79 to 1980, we’re obviously meant to experience ’70s hedonism at its height, a “last dance” paradise lost, run by Rubell, the Wonderful Wizard of Wooze. Instead, we move from ersatz heaven to phony hell.
The movie begins with Shane and his Jersey buddies descending on Studio 54 one fateful night after hearing that “Grease” heartthrob Olivia Newton-John may be there. But the body and style police outside 54’s doors, including strict Marc the Doorman (Daniel La Paine), joined by Rubell himself, reject Shane’s buddies as too tacky and will accept Shane only if he takes off his striped shirt. Soon he’s inside, moving and grooving. And later on he gets hired as a busboy, bonds and moves in with fellow busboy Greg Randazzo (Breckin Meyer) and Greg’s sultry open-marriage wife, Anita (Salma Hayek), coat-check girl and aspiring disco diva.
Shane’s buddies, except for a later scene, vanish. (Who needs buddies?) But other colorful characters hanging around 54 fill the void. They include a beleaguered bookkeeper Viv (Sherry Stringfield), various drug dealers and sleazos, two nearly mute imitations of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol, a disco granny named Disco Dottie (Ellen Albertini Dow) and Shane’s all-time romantic fantasy, soap opera goddess Julie Black (Neve Campbell). And Shane, meanwhile, learns to get ahead by pleasuring bossman Rubell. Soon Shane is upgraded from hot pants busboy to shirtless bartender.
By the end of the movie, the I.R.S., blasted friendship, stolen skimmed money and other problems are all descending like a dark storm on Studio 54’s little world. The fact that writer-director Mark Christopher tries to play Disco Dottie’s big fadeout scene for pathos, or that he tries to demonstrate Shane’s integrity by having him refuse oral sex and threesomes with Julie and a male friend, indicates how seriously off-kilter the movie’s sense of the old Studio 54 probably is.
Christopher, making his feature debut after the widely praised short “Alkali, Iowa,” doesn’t seem to have a grip on anything here. Trying to re-create the frenzy of a vanished time, yet also view it with critical distance, the movie, in the end, can’t even show us a good time. This is a film that wants to be a party — or at least to recall one — and yet ignores one law of how to make a great night out: plan meticulously and then throw caution to the wind.
Christopher may want to give us something in the vein of “Saturday Night Fever” from a more jaundiced “Boogie Nights” perspective. But this film lacks “Saturday Night’s” pop fervor or “Boogie’s” humor, and he misses the evanescent spirit of the late ’70s as well. Some of the movie is cripplingly conventional, though it will still offend the offendable. And some of his characters would have to be improved greatly even to qualify as cliches.
Though the cast is full of faces and bodies, some very attractive, few of them stick in the mind. The acting is nondescript, the writing sometimes awful. And the film, astonishingly, doesn’t even look good. Often, it resembles a standard ’70s porno feature in which all the sex has been cut out — perhaps mercifully. After a while, after too many scenes of bartenders defending their virtue or too much boogieing and worldly wisdom from Disco Dottie, you begin to feel as if you’ve stumbled into a weird sexual retro-funhouse with no way out.
“54” is bad on every level: writing, directing, acting, interior decoration and as a record of the period. What went wrong? Perhaps Christopher was hamstrung by a studio desire to keep the movie mainstream. Perhaps this just isn’t his subject. Whatever the fault, the sex scenes are as dull as the rest of the movie — though Myers livens things up when he hits on Shane and then vomits all over the skimmed cash on his bed.
Filled with flailing dancers and murky backgrounds that begin to suggest a high-school prom on the theme “Disco Madness,” “54” is like a party that goes bad as soon as the guests walk in the door. Perhaps the only hope for the movie (or, more precisely, for the audience watching it) would be to have the picture turned off so the audience could leave their seats and dance to the soundtrack. But even then, you’d still hear the dialogue.
”54”
(star)
Directed and written by Mark Christopher; photographed by Alexander Gruszynski; edited by Lee Percy; production designed by Kevin Thompson; music supervisors Susan Jacobs, Coati Mundi Hernandez; produced by Richard N. Gladstein, Dolly Hall, Ira Deutchman. A Miramax release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:32. MPAA rating: R (language, sensuality, nudity).
THE CAST
Shane O’Shea ……….. Ryan Phillippe
Anita ……………… Salma Hayek
Julie Black ………… Neve Campbell
Steve Rubell ……….. Mike Myers
Billie Auster ………. Sela Ward
Greg Randazzo ………. Breckin Meyer
