The Jazz Singer movie review & film summary (1980)
For example: In the film, Diamond plays a young Jewish cantor at his father's synagogue. He is married, he has apparently settled down to a lifetime of religion. But he also writes songs for a black group-and when one of the quartet gets sick, Diamond takes his place, appearing in a black nightclub in blackface. Oh yeah? This scene is probably supposed to be homage to Jolson's blackface performance of "Mammy" in the original, but what it does in 1980 is get the movie off to an unintentionally hilarious start.
The bulk of the movie concerns Diamond's decision to leave New York, his father and his wife and go to Los Angeles, where he hopes to break into the music industry. This whole business of leaving the nest, of breaking the ties with his father, seems so strange in a middle-aged character: Diamond is just too old to play these scenes. But no matter; the movie is ridiculous for lots of other reasons.
When he arrives in LA, for example, he's instantly "discovered" in a recording studio by Lucie Arnaz, who plays an agent and is filled with energy and spunk-she's the best thing in the movie. She thinks he has promise, so she gets him a job as the opening act for a comic. This gives Diamond a chance to sing, and his onstage appearances, I guess, are supposed to be the big deal in this movie. Because of that, the film sacrifices any attempt to present them realistically: For his West Coast debut as a warm-up for a comic, Diamond is backed up by dozens of onstage musicians, Which look like the LA Philharmonic and, at union scale, would cost upwards of $80,000. Sure.
The plot plods relentlessly onward. Laurence Olivier plays the aging father in the film, in a performance that seems based on that tortured German accent he also used recently in "The Boys from Brazil," "Marathon Man" and "A Little Romance": Is it too much to hope that Sir Laurence will return to the English language sometime soon? Father and son fight, split, grudgingly meet again, hold a tearful reunion-all in scenes of deadly predictability.
One sequence that is not predictable has Neil Diamond abandoning the (now pregnant) Lucie Arnaz in order to hit the highway and become a road show Kristofferson. This stretch of the film, with Diamond self-consciously lonely and hurting, is supposed to be affecting, but it misfires, it drips with so much narcissism.
