Rent (2005)

Chris Columbus, a filmmaker previously occupied with a small boy left home alone and a school of witchcraft, here turns his attention to the East Village of 1989. Rent arrives as an adaptation of Jonathan Larson's Broadway musical, itself descended from Puccini's La boheme, and it carries the weight of a stage phenomenon into a film that mostly stands still and sings. Six members of the original Broadway cast reprise their roles, which lends the enterprise a measure of fidelity and a matching measure of staginess.

The material is saturated with queer life. Gay, bisexual, and lesbian characters anchor the narrative, a drag queen named Angel serves as the emotional center, and the AIDS epidemic runs through nearly every scene like a second soundtrack. None of this is decoration. The film's emotional architecture rests on the virus and the community it devastated, and it regards that community with a matter-of-fact tenderness that predates the era when such things became a marketing bullet point.

The politics are blunter. A landlord named Benny schemes to evict the homeless and erect a cyber studio, and our bohemians resist with a protest that becomes a riot. The film has little patience for the man who sells out, and Mark's brief employment at a television news program is framed as a moral compromise. Race sits largely unremarked amid a genuinely diverse ensemble, present but never interrogated. The songs deliver their messages with the subtlety of a handbill: live for today, measure your life in love, resist the machine. It is sincere, occasionally stirring, and about as preachy as a musical can be without a pulpit. The result is a period piece about a period that already knew it was one.

This is a film of earnest intention and uneven execution, and its cultural markers are mostly inherited from a stage work that got there first. We classify it accordingly, with the weary respect owed to any artifact that sang about AIDS before the culture was ready to listen.

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