Considering All That Jazz

          

I will try not to fault Bob Fosse’s deeply personal investigation of his life and pathologies, All That Jazz, for the fact that I left its screening with a vile headache that rebuffed all treatment for the length of a day. I even feel a bit implicated in its low self-perception by the film critic in the movie who also claimed to have left the movie within the movie with a pounding headache. But what distinguishes myself from the film’s reductive vision of its potential critics is that I greatly admire All That Jazz. Even despite my physical suffering, it is an undeniable achievement and I would gladly watch it again.

Telling the story of a work obsessed cad, based on the film’s director, Fosse, All That Jazz makes tremendous use of mise en scene, editing, and the dancer’s art to fully envelope us in Fosse's vision of his own world. From its very opening we know the film makers are ambitious and capable. I love the density of information held within the opening montage, which then gets repeated throughout the film but serves at the beginning to set pace, tone, and character in a sequence of images that would make Eisenstein squeal in Soviet Formalist glee.

From there the film declares its self a musical by immersing us in song and dance before we even really know anyone’s name. The opening audition sequence tells us volumes about the lives and personalities we will be spending the movie with. The main character Joe Gideon is revealed as a monomaniacal workaholic and philanderer. All of which we know before the first significant dialogue scene and which is elaborated upon and analyzed throughout the movie but is not made any more clear than it is at the very beginning. It is a grand and inspiring use of cinema to tell so much while saying so little.

Yet while the film has long stretches showing perfect economy of eloquence, consider the accountancy scene when a laundry list of numbers in an otherwise quiet room delivers both a joke and a tragic realization without a wasted word, it also suffers from superfluous redundancy to beat the band. Things we know about Joe, and which he knows we know, and which we know he knows we know, get restated and re-explained ad-nauseum in dialogue, flashback, song and dance. Yes he is indomitable and frivolous. Yes he conflates love and death and fears them equally. We could have done with a whole lot less of him confronting his own limitations. I am impressed with great film making, great dancing, and great art all of which this film has in spades. But well before the end of All That Jazz I also realized I would never be as impressed with Bob Fosse as he was with himself.