Flashy Trash

By Frank Rich

THE ROSE

Directed by Mark Rydell Screenplay by Bill Kerby and Bo Goldman

Bette Midler is not a great singer or a subtle actress or an exquisite beauty; yet she just may be a movie star. In The Rose, a highly fictionalized biography of a Janis Joplin-like rock icon, Midler can hardly be contained by a wide screen and six-track Dolby Stereo. She not only blasts out her many numbers with blistering fury, but she also attempts to strike every emotional chord known to junky movie melodrama. Even when she comes up flat, it is hard to look away. Midler does not make the mistake of begging for attention, like her cabaret colleague Liza Minnelli; she retains a sense of humor about herself. By mixing outrageous show-biz posturing with low-key self-effacement, she is a mastermind at getting the audience on her side.

The Rose is exactly the kind of vehicle one would expect for Midler's screen debut: it aspires to the tradition of Funny Girl and Lady Sings the Blues, musicals that boosted Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross to fast movie stardom by casting them as legendary singers of the past. Still, there is a basic flaw in The Rose's design that makes the film hard to take seriously. While Streisand and Ross were reasonably plausible stand-ins for Fanny Brice and Billie Holiday, Midler is not credible as a bluesy rock belter. Her strident Broadway voice and campy mannerisms have more in common with Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland or even Brice than they do with a heroine who dresses, talks and self-destructs in the style of Joplin.

As it happens, The Rose is so unfaithful to its ostensible subject that the miscasting is eventually forgotten. For all the film's rock-concert ambience, its overeager references to Viet Nam and drugs, it has almost nothing to do with the '60s or the counterculture. The movie's true setting is the timeless never-never land of Hollywood kitsch; The Rose is a definitive catalogue of A Star Is Born cliches. The heroine battles with booze and men and show-biz tycoons, but somehow always manages to get out onstage and give a hell of a show. She has only two temperaments, childlike vulnerability and childish tempestuousness. The howler-ridden script makes little effort to tie these bromides to a plot or flesh them out with psychological insights. We are asked to believe that Rose's problems all stem from a fateful night when she let the entire high school football team have its way with her.

Rather than pretend that this material makes any naturalistic sense, Director Mark Rydell (Cinderella Liberty) shrewdly goes for broke. The Rose has the same visual excess and garish romanticism as the oldtime Technicolor backstage sagas. When Rose gets into a yelling match with her manager (a somewhat forlorn Alan Bates) or plays in bed with her pickup of a lover (a frisky, sexy Frederic Forrest), the closeups are steamy and relentless. When Rose lands by helicopter at her nighttime stadium concerts, it looks like the arrival of the mother ship in Close Encounters (both films were shot by Vilmos Zsigmond). The movie's many drunken barroom brawls, not to mention its gratuitous excursions into the gay demimonde, unfold in gaudy, neon-tinged studio sets. This is vulgarity at its most absurd and most amusing -- and why not?

For Bette Midler, self-styled queen of "trash with flash," The Rose is an ideal throne. --Frank Rich

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