It's been almost a year since I made a list of 200 movies I'd never seen before, and started working my way through the list alphabetically, and now I'm just 15% finished, and I should really pick up the pace (I would probably be done the goddamn list if I didn't force myself to write about them).
Cabaret
1972
Hinted at in both my previous Never Seen It entry (Butch Cassidy, with Frank) and in another random movie blog post a few weeks ago (about Soul, specifically), I'm starting to get a little weary of the fact that I tend to zoom out a little too far after a viewing experience, tend to focus on gloopy flaccid big picture ideas while ignoring the myriad of important little details that can separate the wheat films from the chaff films. So with Cabaret, I made at least somewhat of an effort to take some notes on specific filmmaking aspects that I noticed, mostly little things that I thought Cabaret (and by extension, the actors, director, crew, etc.) did well.
In retrospect, Cabaret was probably a good movie to perform this exercise for, since—if you'll allow me just one tiny moment to zoom out, just once—I didn't think Cabaret was very successful in telling a compelling or interesting or cohesive story. Clearly, the film wanted to trace the rise of Nazism in Germany as a backdrop to a romance, but the whole Nazi part felt a little too backgrounded, if that makes sense. I was not all that interested in the drama happening on center stage between an American flapper and a British bisexual academic—that description makes it seem a lot less droll than it actually was on screen—but I would have been interested in what was happening around the margins, with Germany slowly slipping into authoritarian control. But that stuff was so far out in the margins that you could barely see it. I get that the film was going for a "but if this ever happened to you then it might happen in the margins of your life too!" type of thing, but that fucked up the balance, and I was just bored for a lot of it.
From what little I remember from the theater production Pam and I saw like three-ish years ago (so yes, I was familiar with the story already, maybe that's why I was so hard on the movie's take on it?), the Nazism was a little more front and center in the stage version. Still somewhat in the background, but the characters were clearly within that world, instead of completely besides it. Plus, the B-plot was completely changed, adjusted for 1970s American audiences I presume, for whatever reason (not even worth getting into here, honestly). But whereas I remember being enthralled with Arden Theater Company's version of Cabaret, Bob Fosse's movie version, for reasons that I have to assume were story-related, left me completely flat.
So let's zoom back in, and see if there was anything I appreciated on a more molecular level. Was Cabaret a complete bust? Absolutely not. I thought there were things it did successfully, even if, as a whole, the movie didn't quite work all that well.
Probably the biggest thing I appreciated was the editing, and how certain shots were definitely designed to elicit an emotion out of its audience. (Is "shots" the right term there? I've never come within 50 yards of a film class. "Edits" maybe? I don't know.) I'm first thinking of two specific cuts that got opposite reactions out of me. One of when Sally and Maximillian were obnoxiously giggling through brunch, with a brutal out-of-nowhere cut to a dead body, having been killed by Nazis (which told us that our protagonists were blissfully unaware of the horrors building up around them). The other was a smash cut from Brian at the very start of a confrontation with a group of Nazis to a close-up of his bandaged and bloodied face in a hospital bed (which told us that Cabaret can ever have a sense of humor about the violence, I guess).
I also thought the constant interludes of performances back at the actual Cabaret show were intriguing. As a filmmaking choice, I thought it was the wrong one—they were both too obvious (yes, we get it, the silly songs also reflect what will be happening in the next scene) and too superfluous (what, exactly, are these long performances adding to the film besides spectacle?). But taken individually, I thought each of them were pretty well-done. You could tell that Bob Fosse knew his way around a choreographed dance, in other words. Plus, I thought it was interesting how they framed the audiences of these performances. Lots of close-ups of fat guffawing faces, lots of disorienting camera angles, lots of slapstick-y performances that were not as funny as the audience made them out to be. Cabaret took great pains in making the audience seem like morons at best—and rightly so, since, ya know, Nazism was allowed to creep into the audience by the end. The audience was not conquered, they were complicit. (This is what I'm getting from the camera angles and edits, not from the story itself, which again, was too weak in this regard.)
And finally, I thought that the film did a good job with fucking with our expectations of some individual scenes, which could've seemed like a "gotchya" in less able hands. I'm thinking first of the Sally performance where she is just belting out her feelings on stage, and you're wondering why the audience is dead silent this time if they are normally slobbering and rambunctious... but then the camera zooms out and you realize that she is performing for an empty theater (a cringeworthy metaphor story-wise but admittedly a nice edit). I'm also thinking about the scene at the beer garden, where a teen boy starts singing this pretty little tune about Hope for Tomorrow, and you're thinking that this will be a nice little moment in the film, and then the camera zooms out again and you realize he's a Hitler Youth, and holy shit you were just about to compliment the singing abilities of a Nazi (definitely less cringeworthy of a decision story-wise, but then again this is like the only time the rise of fascism is made explicit in the film).
Was any of this enough to certify Cabaret as a "successful" film? Probably not, despite what the Oscars will tell you (eight wins, besting The Godfather's measly three). The flopsweat was visible throughout, and yet even so, I found myself bored most of the time (so much so that I definitely fell asleep for a half hour and had to rewatch the next morning before we viewed the back half that night). Even if there were dozens of little things that Cabaret did right, there were too many big, unavoidable things that Cabaret did wrong. I'm glad I watched it, but only because it was a good movie to make an attempt to notice the little things in the first place—the big picture certainly wasn't good enough to distract me from that attempt.
GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: In a big attempt to see what else Martin Scorsese has to offer besides four-hour criminal epics, we're gonna try Cape Fear (and maybe talk to my Scorsese-fanboy friend Dwyer about it, depending on how quickly he's willing to answer emails).
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