And yet...
Looking at the reaction to "Tick, Tick...Boom!"
If you read the New York Times review of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s movie, “Tick, Tick...Boom!” you might, as I did, feel the takeaway is: if you miss it, you haven’t missed much. It’s the story of Jonathan Larson, the creator of the Broadway smash musical, “Rent.” Larson lives in near-penury in New York, and he has a dream—to produce the musical he has labored on, barely surviving, for years. He’s about to turn 30, and he worries that he has wasted his life on this dream. But it’s not the story of “Rent.” It’s Larson’s story, pre-“Rent,” and so it’s not a story about success, but, rather, of failure. The show Larson struggles to bring to the stage, called “Superbia,” fails. And yet. That is the story of the movie: And yet. It’s actually the sentiment at the core of “Rent,” too, but “Rent” was an enormous success, and success is not as interesting as failure, both in life and in art.
The review is snarky as only a review can be when the writer selects her words deftly to stab, while at the same time managing to have those words seem critically insightful. Look at the critic’s vocabulary:
“‘Tick, Tick … Boom!,’” a self-portrait of the artist as an angst-ridden wretch, which Miranda has reverently dusted and polished like a sacred totem for a select cult.”
Here's the thing: the review may have something. “Tick, Tick...Boom!” may not be a great movie, by any standard. But what I sense beating in the reviewer’s tone is the heart of a cynic. Someone who is terrified of passion, of elation. And maybe someone who in the end simply does not like New York.
My thoughts are less about whether the reviewer is right or wrong than about open-heartedness and the glory of New York and why people make their way there. Haters of New York, abandon all hope ye who enter here!
Whenever I read a condescending review like this, that has traces of anti-New York, I think of E.B. White’s ever-amazing essay, “Here Is New York,” the best thing ever written about the city. If you want to know what New York is, and always will be, read it. (It’s a book now, thankfully, and not expensive.)
Here’s what White has to say about the city’s open arms: “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is...a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart...each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer.”
Corny? Well, I suppose you could say so. And yet. And yet it’s stirring, and it’s still as true as when White wrote those lines over 70 years ago.
Hope is at the heart of this movie and it’s at the heart of “Rent” and it’s at the heart of “La Bohème,” the Puccini opera on which “Rent” is based. It’s also at the heart of the great musical “A Chorus Line,” which, I imagine, the Times reviewer of “Tick, Tick...Boom” would have panned as well.
It’s interesting to read A.O. Scott’s review of the movie version of “Rent,” written in 2005. He was on the precipice of veering into cynicism as the reviewer of “Tick” does, but, no. He writes: “‘Rent’ is often dramatically jumbled and musically muddled—but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat.”
Scott writes about “the disdain of hipsters who might find it woefully unsophisticated. Its idea of Bohemia is not realistic, but romantic, even utopian. Openhearted to a fault, it stakes its integrity on the faith that even in millennial New York, some things—friendship, compassion, grief, pleasure, beauty—are more important than money or real estate.”
Good for you, A.O.!
It’s always sad to encounter a cynic. But most particularly a young cynic. Who probably never has experienced a lump in the throat. Or, if so, would never dare to tell you about it. It’s ok, I want to tell her, really, it’s ok.