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Heavily indebted to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ in its combination of reality and fantasy in exploring the artistic mind and temperament, All That Jazz is a reflective, energetic movie about a genius director/choreographer grappling with impending death. For such weighty material, All That Jazz feels incredibly alive, joyous even in its combination of self-examination and mordant humor.
Bob Fosse was one of the greats. Whether talking about choreography or directing, Fosse must be mentioned in the pantheon of world-class level masters of the craft. His film career got to a bumpy start with Sweet Charity, but his next feature, Cabaret, was a work of absolute greatness. He changed the musical not only on stage with works like Chicago and Pippin, but in the movies, with the game-changing editing tricks of All That Jazz and Cabaret.
Fosse turns his camera into a scan of his own brain, body, and soul. All That Jazz is littered with self-reflective choices, from storytelling beats, character relationships and interactions, to casting choices. Based on the time in Fosse’s life when he was editing Lenny and prepping Pippin for its Broadway debut, the film follows the trials and tribulations of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), as he juggles his directing duties with his relationships with his ex-wife (Leland Palmer), his girlfriend (Ann Reinking), his daughter (Erzsebet Foldi), and the angel of death, Angelique (Jessica Lange).
Love and death are eternally twisting and contorting around each other, and Gideon/Fosse are constantly reflecting, or deflecting, their own mortality and moral culpability. Palmer’s Gwen Verdon stand-in has an equally complex relationship with the fictional Fosse, as she is starring in his new stage show as a mea culpa from him for his years of philandering. While Reinking is doing a spin on her actual life at the time, and her presence is no less complicated as she is one of the three muses who chastise and celebrate him during his hospital hallucinations.
The most obvious example of this moral and mortality, love and death geometry are the frequent cutaways to a hallucinatory mind palace where Gideon flirts, argues, and makes a case for his life with Angelique. Lange’s natural coolness is used to tremendous effect here as she mostly sits impassively and calls him out on his bullshit, appearing almost charmed and entertained by his continual copping out.
All That Jazz never asks for us to like Gideon, only to try and understand him even as he exhibits self-destructive and questionable behavior. He’s a fascinating, complex character, brought to fully lived-in life by Roy Scheider, in a performance that should have gotten him an Oscar but he was up against Dustin Hoffman’s more likable protagonist in Kramer vs Kramer. Scheider’s cracked handsome face can project a tremendous amount of emotional range and complexity with relatively little movement. He does a tour de force of minimalistic acting in “Bye Bye Life,” an extended death rattle in Gideon’s imaginary life.
For all of Gideon’s obsession with his mortality, given a not-so-subtle hint in his morning ritual of eye drops, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine, ever-present cigarette and daily dose of sex, turns his imaginary life into an Ingmar Bergman-like confessional. We trace his history, his penchant for mordant humor, and cathartic peace making with the important individuals in his life. For all the obsessive flirtations and ruminations on mortality, All That Jazz is the liveliest tango with death you’ll ever watch.
The sweaty bodies in geometric patterns and angular movements of Fosse’s choreography are all there, and his dancer orgy is one of the great extended dance sequences in cinema. Yet what really lingers in Fosse’s dark humor, or the way he undercuts his brilliant choreography with a punchline. After the erotic dance is completed, his backers are in a frenzy of complaints about its vulgarity. Or how he cross-cuts between his beautiful imagination, and his open-heart surgery. Or how he drops in a meeting with his backers learning that if he dies, and they let the show die, they’ll walk away with a fortune, in effect allowing Angelique to get a two-for-one special. But no joke is quite as dark as the final image, with Gideon’s body getting wrapped up in a bag as Ethel Merman belts out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” over the soundtrack. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also a brilliant bit of editing.
Viciously honest, All That Jazz is a masterpiece of the artist at work, at the end of his life, and a dazzling piece of eye candy. But there’s more to it than its sweaty, grimy, beautiful, and haunted surface textures, as the narrative is a bounty of rich, dense dramatic material. Fosse only made five films, two of which are pinnacles of the movie musical that completely changed how we viewed their editing and emotional tactile senses. This is the movie that Nine tried to be.
