Altmanesque ambition

Young director Kevin Tancharoen's remake of Alan Parker's Academy Award-winning musical film Fame is a grab bag of elegance and camp. Fresh, candid cinematography meets MTV production values in a strange combination of teen soap opera, Step Up aesthetics and art-house aspirations.

The iconic original picture, confrontational as it was, addressing issues like abortion, homosexuality, drug addiction and artistic freedom, is a curious choice for the fledgling director to take on for his feature film debut. Fame redux is a modest, sweet film, but, in Tancharoen's hands (and screenwriter Allison Burnett's), the tale is essentially whitewashed, striped of any political and sociological significance, and its entertainment value is considerably diminished as well.  

Tancharoen's version adopts the same plot structure - if not the same plot - as the original. The film is broken into five sections: Beginning with auditions for admittance to the school, the story follows a class of students from freshman year through graduation as they sweat and strain through the growing pains of adolescence and artistic development.

The ensemble cast of kids is a talented bunch, less as thespians than musicians and dancers, but apart from the pair featured most prominently - Asher Brook and Kay Panabaker as young lovers on the make - the various characters blend together into a forgettable pastiche of teenage clichés. The mass of them struggle together to overcome adversity and achieve professional proficiency, but, despite some superficial familial and financial troubles, they are a classless, crisis-free crew, bearing all the traumatic burdens of the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 or The O.C.

Cheers and Frasier veterans Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth team up as fellow teachers, with Neuwirth taking the opportunity of a more substantial role to outshine her longtime collaborator.

Charles S. Dutton (Alien 3, Rudy, House M.D.) is at his paternalistic best as drama teacher James Dowd, uttering instructions like "Talk to us, not at us," and "The theater is no place for cowards," with enough sincerity to make such soporific aphorisms ring true.

Young Malik (Collins Pennie) and his mother (Michael Hyatt, from The Wire) bravely enact a trite aside akin to a scene from a fourth rate A Raisin in the Sun, with the matriarch challenging her son's intention to become an actor (apparently too impractical, that) by asking derisively, "Who told you that you were so special?" to which the young man replies, "You did, Momma."

At its best, sections of the film evoke the loose, enchanting pacing of director Robert Altman's The Company (a far better and more memorable portrait of ambition and the hardships of the artistically inclined), and cinematographer Scott Kevan and editor Myron I. Kerstein are to be applauded for their efforts.

But the 25-year-old Tancharoen is no Altman, and he clearly isn't destined for cinematic greatness. The director - known primarily for his work as a choreographer for Madonna and Britney Spears - achieves a portrait of the artist as a young man/woman that is simultaneously sexy and shallow, earnest and naive. In one illustrative vignette - to take just one - a drunk Joy Moy (Anna Maria Perez de Taglé) raps her way through a version Eazy-E's "Boyz-N-The Hood" ("Cruisin' down the street in my six-fo', jockin' the bitches, slappin' the hos" and so on). Suffice it to say, the film is an intensely juvenile take on what it means to attempt to attain the kind of discipline and sacrifice required to master the performing arts.

Such shortcomings call to mind Dowd's admonishment, administered early in the film: "There are plenty of angry roles, but no angry actors." In other words, it's one thing to portray immaturity, it's quite another to exhibit it.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com