‘All that Jazz’: A Kubrickian movie musical masterpiece
Several themes run through almost each and every movie nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at this year’s Academy Awards. Nihilism plays a part in the construction of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin and Daniels’ manic sci-fi Everything Everywhere All at Once, whilst power struggles fester in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. But it’s the turmoil of the artist, explored in Tár, Elvis and The Fabelmans, that takes centre stage at this year’s Oscar ceremony.
Indeed, the Academy Awards have long been obsessed with such movies, with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2014 movie Birdman being the most recent example of their passion, telling the story of a cynical cinema star who tries to reignite his career on the theatre stage. Though where Birdman won an undeserved Oscar exploring exactly why creativity is so exhausting and arduous, 35 years prior, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz narrowly missed out on the show’s highest honour despite exploring the same themes with impassioned defiance against art’s toil.
Nominated for ‘Best Picture’ alongside ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Fosse’s semi-autobiographical fantasy, based on aspects of his own life and career as a dancer, choreographer and director, is a hypnotic odyssey through the inner turmoil of being an obsessive creative. Starring Roy Scheider, who also received a ‘Best Actor’ nod, the film charts the life of a theatre director with a haywire attitude to art, drugs and relationships.
Uttering “It’s showtime, folks!” into his mirror as part of his meticulous morning routine, which also includes the classical sounds of Vivaldi and a selection of pills, including Visine, Alka-Seltzer, and Dexedrine, Scheider’s Joe Gideon lives his life from one show to the next, giving off the pretence that he has everything under control. Addicted to theatre as much as he is to his many pills, Gideon is constantly trying to pursue an artistic goal greater than himself, being totally disinterested in doing anything else.
Establishing a protagonist who possesses dangerous tunnel vision, Fosse’s film effortlessly unfolds with cabaret cinematography, telling the story of a man’s mortality that teeters on the boundaries between genius and insanity. Navigating the physical and mental torture the many arms of performance can force onto an artist, Fosse’s film grows to become something far more complex, dealing with the matter of life, death and the pursuit of glory.
“I became very interested in death and hospital behaviour, and the meaning of life and death and those kinds of subjects,” Fosse explains in an interview, outlining how the film originated as a kitchen sink drama, inspired by his own time in hospital following a heart attack. Eventually, this turned into something of an autobiographical exploration of personal mortality, adding: “I like the subject, and I would really like to do something in the same area but using the tools I knew best, which was song and dance”.
The result is a painful exploration of a man who cannot see beyond his own artistic pursuits of greatness, sacrificing family and relationships almost against his own will, for he does not get the same satisfaction from life’s simple pleasures as he does from the allure of the stage. Indeed, Gideon abides by the exact mantra of Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s Oscar nominee, who states: “You gotta sublimate yourself, your ego, and, yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself”.
Naming the movie the “best film I think I have ever seen,” the master of cinematic existentialism, Stanley Kubrick held a strong passion for the movie for a good reason, with Fosse’s movie telling the story of a fragile artistic perfectionist reflecting many of the former’s own attributes. Many decades later, the film stands as an exemplary exploration of the tortured artist, being an influential precursor to Field’s Tár, Iñárritu’s Birdman and even Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs.
