The Producers (2005)

The Producers: 2005, dir. Susan Stroman. Seen Jan. 2, 2006 at Alamo Lake Creek.
I’ve had music from The Producers stuck in my head since we saw the movie on Monday night.
However, the song stuck in my head is the version of “Prisoners of Love” from the end of the 1968 film, not from the recent musical adaptation/remake. We don’t have a term yet for a movie adapted from a Broadway musical adapted from a movie, although my boyfriend thought of the perfect word to describe the film: unnecessary.
The Producers is one of the most unnecessary movies I have seen in the past year, the other one being the remake of The Bad News Bears.
I can only assume that these movies aren’t made for people who have seen (and like) the original films. Filmmakers, studios, and/or distributors assume that the audience will be a younger crowd who has heard of this movie title in a vague sort of way—in the case of The Producers, as a highly successful Broadway production with charismatic movie stars in the leads. Therefore, no one sees a problem with lifting scenes and dialogue wholesale from the original movie, trimming out some of the best lines, reworking others to make them more contemporary, and re-creating these beloved bits so that they are pale shadows of the source that will cause people who like the original film to wince.

The Producers is one of the few 2005 movies that caused tears to form in my eyes, during the first 20 minutes. The tears were not brought on by some wonderfully sad dramatic moment; nor were they tears of joy. I wanted to cry because the reworking of the first scenes of the 1968 movie, which were some of the best and funniest in the film, was absolutely abysmal. Painfully bad. No humor, no sense of comic pacing, nothing. If you hadn’t seen the original movie, though, you might have found some of the lines slightly funny—I could hear faint laughter throughout the theater. The suspicions I had harbored when I saw a clip of the movie on TV the previous week were confirmed.
I was tempted to ask my boyfriend if we could walk out of the movie, and I figured he would agree, but part of me wanted to witness the whole travesty and see if it would get worse, and another part of me realized that we were in an Alamo Drafthouse theater and had bought dinner there and couldn’t leave until we settled the bill. As much as I love Alamo, I think we should be careful about seeing movies there that might be dreadful, because you can’t walk out if you ordered food.
Fortunately, the 2005 film started to diverge from the original material shortly thereafter with a cute musical number featuring a room full of accountants and girls wearing nothing but pearls, and I felt better. I even started to enjoy parts of the film.
The Producers was at its weakest when it relied too heavily on dialogue and scenes from the original film, because the actors simply didn’t have the talent to carry these scenes very well. I like Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick just fine, but they could not measure up to Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the non-musical scenes for these particular roles. I suspect one reason is that they did not modify their acting styles from the Broadway stage, and what worked fine on the stage, at a distance, did not transfer well to a movie screen. Broderick was not at all convincing as a mousy, cowed accountant lured into the crazy and corrupt world of Broadway producing. He tended to appear nerdy rather than timid.
The movie worked best during many of its musical numbers, although even here it was uneven. Several were instantly forgettable—the accountant-heavy musical number that I liked was preceded by another song Nathan Lane sang that I found dull and trite. The comic songs were great fun, but Mel Brooks was out of his depth otherwise and the dramatic and buddy-buddy songs were mediocre.
I was disappointed in the choreography, too. I am no expert on dance, but choreography for dance numbers in a film needs to differ from choreography for dance numbers in a Broadway musical. Again, I don’t think the numbers were significantly modified. I kept wishing for Busby Berkeley (who would have demanded much scantier costumes for those girls dressed only in pearls, too).
The choreography problem was exacerbated by a terrible tendency to film everything in close-up. This was annoying during the little-old-lady dance number, in which they have taps on their walkers. It was a clever idea, but in the film we saw very little of the walkers and a lot more of the old ladies’ faces. Most of the “old ladies” in the film were younger dancers in heavy makeup, which was quite obvious in the movie and detracted from the film. (I didn’t like the way they were dressed alike, either. I preferred the charming range of old ladies in the original movie. Once again, I think this probably worked fine on Broadway, but was wrong here.)
The worst victim of the close-up mania was Uma Thurman, who played the delightful Ulla. Uma has the most photogenic legs ever, but even during her dance numbers the camera focused on her attributes above the waist. It seemed such a sad waste. I think this movie may have shone brightest when we got to see women’s legs, quite frankly, and that is not the kind of comment I usually make.
I was happily surprised by Will Ferrell as Franz Liebkind. I am not a big fan of Ferrell’s films as a rule. Along with Uma and her legs, he was another bright spot in the film. Andrea Martin apparently played one of the little old ladies, but I couldn’t recognize her under the makeup.
Also, was I the only person who couldn’t figure out when this movie was set? At first I thought it was just stylized; after I saw the period cars, I realized it had to be the 1940s or 1950s, but it still seemed rather vague. It was only when I saw a row of posters for real Broadway musicals contemporary to the time, such as My Fair Lady, that I figured it had to be the late Fifties (1956 or thereabouts). One tiny little subtitle with the year at the beginning of the film would have solved that problem. The 1968 movie was set in, well, 1968, and I didn’t realize the musical would take place at a different time. Did I miss something?
Actually, I think moving the timeframe to 1956 was a smart idea, and I liked most of the updates that steered the film away from the dated aspects of the 1968 original. No more flower children, for example. However, it makes much less sense to name a character Carmen Ghia if the movie is set in the Fifties.
The changes to the ending of the film, however, did not work as well for me. [If you haven’t seen these movies yet, you may want to skip this paragraph.] In the original film, the main characters attempt to blow up the theater and then after a funny, touching courtroom scene, end the film in jail. In the 2005 film, however, the cops arrest Bialystock for fraud while Bloom escapes to Rio with Ulla … but Bloom returns to the courtroom in time to defend his friend with a sappy musical number. They end up in jail but are pardoned so they can stage Prisoners of Love on Broadway. This doesn’t even make sense. If you don’t understand why, imagine a remake of The Blues Brothers in which Jake and Elwood are magically pardoned at the end. Also, the long jail-cell musical number in which Bialystock re-enacts all the preceding events in the film is long and pointless.
The 2005 version of The Producers made me feel sorry I wasn’t able to see the Broadway musical, which I might have enjoyed. I like the idea of filming a Broadway production so that the millions of people who couldn’t afford to travel to New York would have an inexpensive way to see the play. However, what works on Broadway does not automatically work as a movie, and this movie is a textbook example. I am sorry to pan a film directed by a woman (Susan Stroman), since I like to promote the few female-directed films that actually land a wide release, but female directors can helm cinematic dogs as well as male directors can.
In one aspect, though, The Producers was not pointless and unnecessary. Within an hour of our returning home after seeing the 2005 film, my boyfriend went online and bought the DVD of the 1968 film (we had a VHS copy). Perhaps this weekend, we’ll sit down and enjoy the movie together, marvelling over how good some of the sequences are, laughing wildly at others, and feeling grateful that this movie is so, so much better than the film we saw on Monday night. The fountain scene is one of my favorite scenes in any movie, ever, and I can’t wait to see how it will look on DVD.