To be endured for John Travolta only, Saturday Night Fever wallows in sordid male ugliness in a way that belies its reputation as a dance-tastic artifact of the disco era. Travolta plays Tony Manero, a 19-year-old hardware-store employee who flees his dysfunctional Brooklyn family every Saturday night to transform into a preening, hip-thrusting, beautiful god on the dance floor. Part of the club scene however—especially for Tony’s vulgar cadre of racist, sexist friends—involves “making it” with as many women as possible over the course of the evening, taking turns in the shared car out in the parking lot. (In the film’s most awful scene, “taking turns” means a gang rape.) To be clear, Saturday Night Fever is well aware of and interested in interrogating this ugliness, including Tony’s own complicity in it. (The screenplay is by Norman Wexler, from a story by Nik Cohn.) This is nasty stuff, which would be easier to take if the filmmaking displayed even a hint of the sophistication on display in somewhat similar boys-will-be-awful stories like Mean Streets or Once Upon a Time in America. But director John Badham and editor David Rawlins not only make an awkward concoction of the standard dramatic scenes, with the framing and cutting, they also absolutely botch the dance numbers, jumping haphazardly from stable long shots to jostling close-ups to strange angles looking up from the dance floor into people’s noses. Which leaves us with Travolta. Bouncing through the movie as if the Bee Gees are constantly playing in his head rather than on the soundtrack, he’s not just a marvel of movement—something like a matador flirting with a bull—but also a solid anchor in the more emotional moments. In a quiet scene with Tony’s older brother (Martin Shakar), who has left the priesthood, Travolta offers a tender, earnest, listening presence, lending support to the movie’s vision of Tony as a monster-in-training who might yet be redeemed. If only he had the filmmaking to back him up.
(1/27/2022)
