Fan Dance

By Frank Rich

ALL THAT JAZZ Directed by Bob Fosse Screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur and Bob Fosse

There is nothing unpredictable about Bob Fosse: this gifted director-choreographer has shown the same strengths and weaknesses throughout his stage and film career. As a showman, he has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone. Too often Fosse insists on fusing entertainment with superficially conceived Big Themes. Certainly musicals have a right to be serious, but Fosse's song-and-dance flights into the metaphysical are less illuminating than pretentious. Who cares about, or even remembers, the deeper meanings of such glittery Fosse projects as Cabaret, Pippin and Chicago!

Nowhere is the director's artistic schizophrenia more apparent or disturbing than in All That Jazz, a highly personal film that swings wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous. For half its length, Jazz is a knowing and witty tour of high-powered show biz, with Fosse as the guide. The film's hero, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), is a driven director-choreographer who not only looks like Fosse but also shares his personal and professional history. As Gideon rehearses a new musical that recalls Chicago and edits a new movie that resembles Lenny, he carries on harried, selfish relationships with a lively crew of often recognizable figures.

Gideon's estranged wife and current lover (played by the quicksilver dancers Leland Palmer and Ann Reinking) are virtually undisguised portraits of Gwen Verdon and the real-life Reinking. The hero's artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line.

Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof it up to songs with lyrics about death. A hospital fantasy sequence looks at once like an elaborate antismoking commercial, a parody of Fellini and a Vegas floor show. The results are shocking, but not in the way that Fosse intended.

Though Scheider is a wry, sensitive actor, he soon gets lost in the vulgar theatrics. So does the subject of death. When Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally. All That Jazz contains close-ups of open-heart sur gery, but few insights into Gideon's soul. What Fosse regards as self-analysis often comes out as egomaniacal self-congratulation: there's even a scene where Gideon cries at his own funeral. Still, Fosse is no fool, and at times he is his own best critic. All That Jazz is never more honest than when its hero confesses, "Sometimes I don't know when the bull ends and the truth begins." #151; Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.