Purple Rain (1984)

Rated R for language, a lot of unnecessary nudity and sex, domestic abuse, suicide, and absolute abysmal depictions of women.  I normally don't include that in the MPA section.  But man alive, the way that women are treated in this movie is beyond problematic.  Yeah, I should be throwing stones at the 1980s as a whole, but I honestly see a problem between artist and content.  What am I doing?  This is what my blog is going to be about.  Here I am, burning off good content...

DIRECTOR: Albert Mangoli

I am going to lose some friends over this blog.  One of the weird things about trying to watch every beloved film before I die is that I'm going to treat them as "less precious" as time goes on.  I had this guy in college.  I'm going to put him between friend and associate because I hung out with him from time-to-time, but we were never close.  Back in college, which was now over twenty years ago, we were all hanging.  I saw that this kid had a Scarface poster in his room and my friend and I informed him that we had never seen it.  He was adamant that we watch it immediately.  I didn't realize how long that movie was, but my friend and I sat down and watched it the second we got back to the dorm room.  

We hated it.  

We didn't tell him him that we hated it.  We told him that we didn't like it that much.  Well, that guy lost his mind.  I feel like I'm going to get some of that reaction as I write about Purple Rain.  Now, I am going to give you all the ammunition that you need before I start really ripping into this movie.  I have always admitted that, as much as some music movies really get to me, my nerd weakness has always been music.  I like what I like.  I tolerate a lot more than that.  But ultimately, if I'm a guy who preaches about passion, I am painfully laissez-faire about music.  There's a couple Prince songs I like.  I like hearing stories about Prince.  That New Girl appearance was pretty fun.  But beyond that, I don't have that much attachment to Prince.  Even his contribution to the Batman soundtrack didn't phase me that much.

I honestly think that this is barely a film.  Maybe some people are cool with that.  Maybe that's what makes them really like it.  It's the thing that feels like guerilla filmmaking that gets them so involved.  After all, I was obsessed with Clerks around the time that I was watching Scarface.  (I'll try to remember to get to Kevin Smith in a second.) But as I grew up, I really didn't care for that style of moviemaking.  There's independent film and then there's independent film that excuses itself for being independent film.  I don't even see Purple Rain as an independent film.  I'm watching this as a studio film trying to capitalize on the fact that His Royal Badness is a marketable name.  

But I do get the vibe that some people view Purple Rain as Prince's A Hard Day's Night.  Outside the fact that we're looking at very different genres, the intention behind both movies feels right there on the surface.  Both movies are exploiting the fact that hardcore fans would do anything for different content involving the artists with their music.  It's a different way to relate to these performers.  Again, I'm not a big music guy.  I feel like there's more distance between performer and consumer when it comes to music.  The fact that music is, by definition, non-visual (I refused to write "audio" there) means that we create a lot more of our personas for musical performers.  It's when an artist makes mega-stardom, much like Prince or Taylor Swift, that we gain some kind of insight into the way that they live their lives.  

The funny thing about A Hard Day's Night, that, despite being overtly-fictionalized versions of their characters, the fab four put on absurd masks to become those characters. A Hard Day's Night, admittedly, has the benefit of being a comedy.  There isn't much vulnerability there, but it's okay because it is a bit of a weird comedy.  Purple Rain goes for the dramatic with a backstage musical that both captures who I think Prince really is while simultaneously being nothing like the real Prince.  It's odd, considering that so much of the film keeps actual names of characters.  Morris Day is Morris Day.  He is the lead singer of The Time.  (By the way, I was horrified to think that maybe Morris Day was a fictional musician that I've been citing this entire time.  Think about it.  I claimed to know The Time, only to realize that I only knew them from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.)   But I honestly think that the worst trait that the Kid has in this movie are actual problems that Prince might have.

Let me explain.  The core issue with the film is that The Kid is wildly unlikable.  We're supposed to be rooting for him because he's Prince, lead singer of The Revolution.  For the fans going into Purple Rain, they are already there rooting for him.  Probably a lot of that audience found him incredibly sexy and are there to watch him do sexual things, some of those things involving a guitar.  But for those people who are watching this as a backstage musical, The Kid sucks.  Yeah, he's got reasons for being a jerk.  His father is abusive (and I have to talk about that!) and Morris Day has it out for him.  Okay.  But from a film watching perspective, it's really weird that Apollonia is really into him.  Like, one of my biggest criticisms of the movie is that it takes completely irresponsible shortcuts to tell its story.  All through the opening act, The Kid is a jerk to Apollonia and she finds it incredibly sexy.  I don't care for that at all.  I really hate it because as the film progresses and The Kid actually has some real problems to deal with, he gets to be a monster.

Yet, the film keeps asking us to root for Apollonia and The Kid to have their happy ending.  That's a real red flag.  Part of the issue that the film dances poorly around is that The Kid is accused of being a narcissist.  He keeps breaking some basic rules of show business because he doesn't get along with the club manager, Billy, who tends to gel with antagonist Morris Day (who is the best part of this movie despite also being gross).  So if we're looking at one internal conflict that he needs to fix, it's the idea that he needs to get over his narcissism to stop hurting the people around him.  The big climax of the film is that The Kid sings the eponymous song "Purple Rain", which is written by his female bandmates.  He's ignored them and treated them terribly throughout the film because he's worried that they're going to steal his spotlight.  When he sings that song, it should be the moment he realizes that it is about the music and the people in his life, not how much people give him validation.  When he sings the song, juxtaposed to The Time's upbeat song before that, it seems like it is career suicide.  He storms off stage in direct defiance to Billy.  Maybe he'll go after Apollonia.  But nope, he turns around when he hears overwhelming applause.  He sees Apollonia, who has somehow forgiven him for hitting her multiple times, and he sings two encores.

Those encores completely destroy the movie.  I mean, the songs are great.  They're absolute bops and I get that the last fifteen minutes of the film are borderline just concert footage.  But he sings "I Would Die for You", where he tells a random woman --meant to be Apollonia --that he would never hurt her even though he's absolutely irredemable at this point.  Then the real cherry on the sundae is "Baby, I'm a Star."  If the problem that the character has in the film is the fact that he needs constant validation for his work and hurts those people around him, singing "Baby I'm a Star" misses the point of the journey we just went on.  That's really messed up.

And from everything I hear from stories, especially the story from An Evening with Kevin Smith, Prince is just that way in real life.  The short version of the story is that Prince hired Kevin Smith to document this concert series that was supposed to be this major movie.  Prince, being divorced from reality, kept that footage for himself basically unwatched and never really gave Smith an explanation for all of that hard work that he did.  I hate to speak poorly of the dead, but he almost had a rep for intentionally distancing himself from people for the sole purpose of creating mystique.  He even burned bridges with Morris Day.  It's like this film was an excuse to have Prince have sex with a pretty lady and make Morris Day to look like a punk, but Morris Day was having too good a time to really care about any of that stuff.

Albert Magnoli wasn't originally the director of the film.  The original director said that the script lacked truth or authenticity.  That's exactly the takeaway I had from the film.  This felt like a first pass at a script and a lot of that script was then thrown out to improvise emotional scenes that don't really work.  Yes, I like the Lake Minnetonka scene.  It was predictable, but it was also a scene that belonged to a different movie.  Like many low-budget films, this had that plot that kept on having the protagonist continually return to the same locations so that they could do the same things that they did before.  Honestly, the whole movie is The Kid telling Apollonia to get on his bike so he can be mean to her somewhere; a drive in the countryside, return home to try to stop his dad from beating on his mom, go to the club and perform a song.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.  

And then the movie has the nerve to tell us that The Kid loved his dad?  There's one quasi-nice scene where The Kid is about to beat up his father for wailing on his mother, only to have him sit down and discover that his father was a wonderful musician.  I'd like to point out that "tortured artists" doesn't excuse domestic abuse, but the movie really ignores that element.  When The Kid's dad tries to kill himself, The Kid takes it as "I'm losing my dad."  But the entire film up to this point is a loathing of the father who treats his mother abysmally.  When Dad shoots himself, there's never a concern for his mother whatsoever.  Mom is there to get beat up so that The Kid has a reason to be angsty.  That's no good.

And the sexualization of women.  I mean, I've seen stuff.  I love James Bond movies and the characterization of women in those movies is terrible.  But the women in this movie are only there to look pretty.  Like, Apollonia's rise to stardom has men fighting over her and she doesn't even sing at that point.  She sings one song in the entire film and it is how she is a sex object.  All the women dance in lingerie because that seems like what Prince would like.  It's really gross.  

My takeaway is that this might only be a movie for Prince fans.  I read that Siskel and Ebert liked the movie a lot, but that doesn't mean that I have to agree.  This feels like an ego trip for Prince more than anything else.  I wanted it to be great because I've heard everyone talk about it.  The worst part is that I now own it on 4K, so I got that going for me.