All That Jazz (1979)

Liked this one a lot.  I was expecting a showtunes-y type musical, something with big choreographed dance numbers and big orchestral bands accompanying the Broadway style music.  Instead, All That Jazz is a more hard-edged, minimal film about a Broadway director, with some rock-style numbers thrown in mostly as background music, for montages and the like.  All That Jazz takes on the ultimate big question—what is the value of life?—in a dark, honest way that still doesn’t provide any conclusive answers; rather it chronicles its main character’s confrontation with death.  It’s worth noting that the writer-director Bob Fosse based the movie on his own life: the juggling of multiple show-business jobs, the drugs, the women, the daughter-and-wife situation, the heart attacks all came from his own experience just a couple of years prior to the making of this film.

I also announce with joy that this completes my first page from Robert McKee’s list!  I skipped a few of the films on it: The Accidental Tourist I watched very first, but did not write a blog entry on—I think I only mildly enjoyed it, and found the story difficult.  (Plan on coming back later.)  I skipped Airplane! Because it’s really just not a very good movie.  I watched Alive but it also wasn’t very good.  Last of all, I watched Amarcord before the present film, but really didn’t like it either.  The people in it are just very disgusting.  I will reserve judgment on Fellini until I see his earlier stuff, but I could have done without wasting the time on Amarcord.

Act I

Sequence: Joe casts his musical.

• Joey Gideon wakes up in the morning and gets ready for a typical day: listening to Vivaldi, smoking while in the shower, taking speed and using eyedrops.  Finally, he’s ready, looks at himself in the mirror, and says, “It’s showtime!”
• Joey runs a large dance audition for a new show he’s putting on.  He flirts with one of the less-talented but attractive dancers Victoria, and confirms her phone number before he accepts her into the show.
• After his audition, rushing out the door, he speaks to Audrey and Michelle, his ex-wife and daughter.  Audrey reminds him he is supposed to take Michelle for the weekend, but he forgot and can’t do it.  Standing at the door, he jokes that he is father of the year.
• Joey edits a movie of a stand-up comic talking about the five stages of dying.  His editing crew is tired and fed up with his unending editing process, but he wants more changes made as he leaves.
• Back at his apartment, Victoria comes over; they make love then fall asleep.  While they are sleeping, Joe’s steady girlfriend Katie walks in on them in bed, throws a fit, then leaves.  Joe feels ashamed, then rolls right over for more fun with Vicky.
• In a flashback, Joe gets his start in the biz and his sexual awakening at the same time, working at age 15 in a cabaret club.  Before he goes on stage, all the burlesque dancers crowd around him and arouse him.  He is in the middle of his tap routine when he realizes the audience is laughing at him for a fresh cum spot standing out on his pants.

Sequence: Joe faces difficulty with song, repairs his relationship with Michelle

• Katie gets offered a touring job and asks Joe if he thinks she should take it.  When he tells her he thinks she should “do what’s best for her,” meaning he doesn’t care if she goes or not, she starts to call a guy and set up a date with him.  Katie and Joe fight, and Joe starts the scene over, and asks her not to go, which satisfies her and she stays.
• At a music discussion session for his upcoming play, Joe softly rejects an offering by Paul, the composer.  As he focuses off into the distance in the room, a series of jarring thoughts and fears cross his mind: a comical reminiscence about living with two girls at once, then images of him clutching at his right hand in pain, and laying in a hospital bed with a breathing mask, thinking about how he smokes too much.
• In the editing room for his movie, Josh, a studio representative, comes by to inquire about progress on the show.  He flips out at the money Joe is costing him, but Joe assuages him when he shows him his recut film, Josh agreeing it’s worth so much more now.
• At rehearsal for the show, Joe is frustrated by the poor material and his own poor choreography thus far.  Joe dances afterwards with his daughter, and has some good father daughter time.  She boldly, semi-accusatorily asks him when he’s going to marry again, listing all his girls he keeps affairs going with.  Joe finally collapses in the corner in a coughing fit.

Sequence: Joe solves dance problem

• At a dance rehearsal, Victoria’s dancing is noticeably worse than all others’.  After putting her through the wringer, Victoria breaks down in embarrassment and discouragement, but Joe asks her to go again.  She finally does, and dances much better, earning the genuine applause of her fellow castmates.
• Joe has an insurance physical, and passes amidst much putrid hacking and coughing from him and the chimney-smoking doctor.
• At another day’s rehearsal, Joe leaves dance rehearsal to think, and starts talking to his wife (who is playing the 24-year old lead in the play to prove to Joe she still can pull it off).  They argue about his philandering and his poor fathering.  Her accusations seem to ignite inspiration in him, and he hustles out of the room to get back to the dance studio.
• Later, he demonstrates the choreography for the showpiece number “Airotica” to Jones and the other producers of the play.  The choreography stuns them as it has now been turned up to a hyper-sexual R-rated style, but is undeniably good.  At the end of it, Audrey runs out of the room crying, saying it’s the best work he’s ever done.

Sequence: Joe has near heart attack

• Joe screens his comic movie for Josh.  Josh loves it, but Joe seems still unsatisfied.
• Having dinner with Michelle and Katie at home, Joe is surprised by them dancing for him, for his approval.  He loves and appreciates the gesture.
• The entire cast gathers for the first full script read-thru.  As the actors descend into casually reading through it, and everyone loving the humor of the script, Joe is suddenly frozen with pain and fear as he suffers a severe angina attack.  He covers up his pain for hours until the reading is done, then rushes to the hospital with Audrey.

Act II

Sequence: Joe chooses to ignore doctor’s orders; producers consider another director for musical

• The doctor diagnoses Joe with severe angina, and says he could be extremely close to having a major heart attack, and orders bed rest.  Joe resists the prescription, but as he vehemently argues with the physicians, he is seized again with pain and laid back down, now undoubtedly constrained to the hospital for further testing.
• Michelle asks Audrey in a cab what is wrong with her dad.  Audrey tells her that he has exhaustion and just needs rest, but Michelle tells her she knows she’s lying.
• Jones holds a meeting with the cast, tells them Joe is overstressed and suffering from exhaustion, but assures them the play will definitely go on: they will all definitely get their money.  To lighten the mood, Paul starts improvising a jaunty number on piano and Audrey dances a jig in the center.
• Jones has a meeting with a man named Lucas, a sought-after director on Broadway.  Jones describes the great opportunity of the show and Joe’s dire condition, implicitly offering Lucas the job, for the same amount of money Joe would be getting.
• Joe and his cardiologist Dr. Ballinger have a mutual ill regard for each other.  Joe is moved up to a private room in the hospital from intensive care but ordered to stay calm and not to eat bad food or smoke.  Joe immediately starts partying though, having many visitors, sneaking bad food and cigarettes, and drinking alcohol.

Sequence: Joe sent into heart surgery, producers assess insurance liability

• The team of doctors at the hospital gathers to discuss Joe’s case.  Some of the younger doctors are astonished that Joe doesn’t seem to care whether he lives or dies; Dr. Bellinger disagrees, saying he believes Joe Gideon cares immensely.
• Visiting Joe at the hospital, Josh raves about the reviews his movie has been getting.  Then Joe turns on a TV to find an extremely negative review by a TV critic.  Joe seems very impacted by the review.
• Joe goes into open heart surgery and has dreams while under the anesthetics of the doctors and staff in very Broadway array discussing his condition.  After he comes out, an orderly tells him he predicts he will live, and he’s hardly ever wrong.
• Joe talks to Katie in his room later, and says he had tried to call her at midnight one night and she didn’t answer.  She admits to being with another man then, and Joe admits this hurts him.  She says she does love him, but doesn’t know whether she can ever count on him.  Joe insists he loves her, and thinks they’re still together.
• Jones and the other producers meanwhile have a meeting with the insurers of the play over Joe’s health condition.  The insurance man lays out that if either Joe returns to health and finishes the show or they bring in another director to finish, they will get no insurance compensation; but if Joe dies and they abandon production, they will get a payment of $1 million, a 100% profit on the approximately $500K they have spent on the show so far.  The offer sounds intriguing and appetizing.

Sequence: Joe survives heart surgery, begins to regret the way he treated Audrey, Michelle, and Katie

• While recovering in the hospital, Joe starts having vivid hallucinations in his bed.  He sees himself as a director, leading a series of numbers by Audrey, Katie, and Michelle, the three women in his life, pleading with him for attention and love, and Joe, stuck in bed, is unable to be for them what they need.
• Joe begs with the blonde woman, Death, not to take him now, he isn’t ready to go.
• Joe’s doctors come in to assess his condition, and say that his incision seems to be healing nice, and he should be getting better.

Sequence: Joe dies

• Lucas meets with Jones for lunch and is deflated to learn he won’t be directing the play now after all.
• Stuck in his bed, Joe begins to feel chest pains again and asks for help from the nurse, but she refuses to do anything for a long time, saying she just gave him his meds and shouldn’t be feeling anything right now.  Joe is finally brought down to the emergency room for immediate care again, as he confronts Death with the reality that something has gone wrong inside him.
• Under his own power, Joe disappears from his hospital bed and wanders the hospital.  He enters the autopsy room, and seeing where he is, tells them he’ll be back to see them soon and leaves.  He consoles an older woman who was suffering in pain and fear, then finally ends up in the cafeteria after hours, singing with a happy janitor there until staff find him and bring him back to his bed.
• Joe’s pulse is very weak as Death starts putting make up on him for his final appearance on the stage of life.  Joe is introduced by the black showman once more as a “so-so entertainer, not much of a humanitarian, and never was anybody’s friend.”
• After a big final number, “Bye Bye Life,” Joe rendezvous with death.  Back on planet earth, his dead body is zipped up into a body bag.

Analysis of the film is difficult along the avenues I am used to.  All of the values the protagonist stands for at one point are contradicted at another—most of all, Joe seems to simultaneously court death, fear it, and understand he is pushing himself into it.  Additionally, he recognizes that his nonstop “screwing around” wounds the trio of women closest to him (ex-wife, daughter, girlfriend), yet does not stop.  It is nevertheless a deeply affecting story, at least to this viewer.

I would classify it as a miniplot story, punitive plot genre classification, best divided into two acts: before and after his heart problems begin.  The sequences are only kind of suggestions; they don’t always build into anything advancing the plot forward.  Joe’s choreography of “Take off with Us” provides a great artistic victory and affirmation, for example, but what does all that matter when his heart is failing him and he can do naught but regret the way he has treated the people closest to him?

The two acts are almost like two different movies contained within one: the first portraying his freewheeling lifestyle, the second his rapid death spiral.  The closest thing I could find to an inciting incident is Joe’s angina attack, which initiates the second half of the movie, and starts the inexorable progress toward the movie’s conclusion.  However, this takes place 1 hour and 8 minutes into the film, in clear violation of McKee’s admonition that you should not keep your audience waiting around for the story to start for more than half an hour.

How is this violation explainable here?  The first thing to recognize is that McKee’s rules, even such a “hard and fast” one as the thirty minute inciting incident rule, aren’t at all hard or fast.  Every story is different, its methods of explication and progress unique to itself and its own needs.  The only question worth asking is whether the story is successful on its own terms.  Does it strike us as good?  (Keeping in mind that tastes between any two people also differ.)

McKee’s rule does provoke some worthwhile discussion points.  With the inciting incident of the fatal conflict coming so late, how does the movie stay interesting for the first hour?  What might the story look like if it was constructed in a more standard way?

Does the first hour of the movie sag?  I find that it does not; what keeps it going?  I think it’s helped along by several musical sequences, which hold attention as long as the songs and visuals are interesting.

Joe does also ride through a few ups and downs in the first act.  He has difficulty imagining a suitable dance sequence for “Take Off With Us,” but outdoes himself in the end with what he comes up with.  He forgets to take care of his daughter one weekend, but has a terrific one-on-one dance session with her, demonstrating his fatherly love for her, and her love of him.  Before we thought very badly of him as a father; now we are maybe willing to forgive his honest mistake after seeing his relationship with his daughter up close.  He similarly damages then repairs his relationship with Katie.  His relationship with Audrey is more tangled, it seems.  She takes the starring role in his new musical, playing a 24-year old character to prove to him that she still has it.  When he triumphantly demonstrates his dance for “Take Off With Us,” his wife cries bitterly, telling him that it’s the best work he’s ever done.  Audrey cannot seem to let go of him, even though he doesn’t give a whit for her feelings.  All three of his women clamor for his approval and attention, which he divides between the three of them and his flings.

What would the movie look like, told in a more conventional fashion? Gideon’s heart troubles begin within the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, and while his condition deteriorates, he goes on trying to live the same life as before.  The lines between cause and effect would be clearer: no ambivalence over fearing death, a stronger regret for his actions, and much less expository material for the first half of the film—that would all be contained inside the rest of the story, as much as possible.

One departure from “conventionality” in this movie (and an obstacle in story analysis) is the blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy.  Once Joe is stuck in the hospital, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between his hallucinations and the truth.  For example, the image of the black smiling showman introducing a guest is first seen on a tv screen in the hospital; by the third time we see him he is fully a part of Joe’s internal thought process.

The scenes where he talks with the beautiful woman in white—Death—are not even clear until the end of the film.  Are they really happening in some other time and place, after the events of the story?  It looks like he’s in a dressing room, talking to an actress.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance?

Joe is a great director, but turns out to have close relationships with almost no one.  When they find out he is seriously ill, the first concern of everyone involved with the play (besides Audrey) is how they’re going to get their money now.  The producers assure the actors they’ll get paid; the insurance company lays out the conditions under which their policy will activate.  When they find out that the money only comes if Joe dies and they abandon production, they kick out the potential replacement and wait for him to either die or finish the play.  He is worth nothing to any of them except money.  (The same is true for Josh, the movie producer who frets about budgets and raves about the positive reviews bringing in a big payday in wide release.)

Joe seeks to improve his relationships with the three main women in his life, all of whom he clearly loves in his own way.  All three demonstrate their continuing adoration for him, not only through displays of love like this but even through their continued toleration of his infidelities.  But even when Joe is on his death bed, he can’t fully confess to his bad ways.

The only woman he has an honest relationship with is the female embodiment of death, with whom he is unfailingly frank, discussing his intentions with the women in his life.  Indeed, he does not even have a stable relationship with himself, as the hallucination scenes show.  He imagines himself as a film director shooting the accusatory songs from Audrey, Katie, and Michelle.  As film director, he hassles himself to make decisions on the material they have shot: his conscience challenges him to come to terms with his infidelity towards all of them.

It turns out that death was the only figure he really courted.  His final stage number, “Bye Bye Life” is not a dirge but a celebration.  He goes out with a bang and a smile on his face.

All That Jazz is a story about a man of contradictions.  He simultaneously loves his wife and girlfriend.  He simultaneously needs to work yet kills himself with stress.  He simultaneously begs Death to come another day and flirts with Her.

Did anyone else notice how he’s always shown with a sheen of sweat?  The most you could say definitively about Joe Gideon is that he lived intensely.