<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" At 84, Clint Eastwood has long been among Hollywood&amp;#039;s greats, but he shines ever more brightly as a director. With 92 nominations and 139 awards (four Oscars and God knows what all else), he can do anything, and he pretty much does. World War II from the Japanese perspective? Check. What happens after we die? Check. The vindictive right-wing FBI head who was also secretly gay? Yep. And don&amp;#039;t forget the impeccably moral gunslinger&amp;#039;s mea culpa, Unforgiven, and the ecstatic, heartbroken middle-aged lovers (Eastwood and Meryl Streep) in The Bridges of Madison County. \u2028  So what on earth comes next? Something plenty earthy: Jersey Boys, the hugely popular Broadway musical, turned into an exuberant summer film with just enough jagged edges to keep things interesting. Transfers like this often flop, but Eastwood knows what he&amp;#039;s doing. His Jersey Boys isn&amp;#039;t just a musical; it&amp;#039;s a movie about four working-class guys whose lives revolve around the music they make and how far it can take them. You can just imagine the full-stage dance number for that\u2014only instead we get drama. The actual Jersey boys were a &amp;#039;60s band called the Four Seasons, and its star and front man was Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, reprising here his Tony Award\u2013winning Broadway role), whose gritty falsetto sent shivers up the spines of countless teenage girls and quite possibly their mothers. As for the drama, there are two kinds. Bands are a lot like families (remember when Metallica hired a shrink?); in this one, the cocky self-appointed leader, Tommy Devito (Vincent Piazza), is devoured by envy of a newcomer, Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), whose velvet tenor harmonizes beautifully with Frankie&amp;#039;s male soprano and who writes most of their best songs; Gaudio is also financially savvy and more educated than the other guys. Related: The Man Who Loves Women The other drama involves Christopher Walken, who plays an aging, gently droll member in good standing of the Jersey mob with his trademark eccentric panache. As mobsters go, he&amp;#039;s a nice guy who mentors Frankie and brokers Tommy&amp;#039;s bad debts like a wily grandpa, enough so that he won&amp;#039;t have to worry about losing his legs or taking a bullet in the back of his head just when the Four Seasons are breaking out. On the page, Jersey Boys may sound like one of those all-guys-all-the-time movies with a few women who seem like extras. And in fact we don&amp;#039;t get too caught up in Frankie&amp;#039;s arguments with his gorgeous wife (Ren\u00E9e Marino) or, later, his bombshell girlfriend (Erica Piccininni), and the vulnerable teenage daughter he dotes on (Freya Tingley) goes by in a blink. But the songs, nearly all of which specialize in pleading to women, are at the heart of the film: &amp;quot;Sherry,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Big Girls Don&amp;#039;t Cry,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Working My Way Back to You,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.&amp;quot; Related: 10 Series to Fill That Binge-Size Hole in Your Heart It may seem odd that an icon of such mega-machismo as Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name trilogy would choose a jukebox musical to adapt. But another side of Eastwood is musical, and it has deep roots. His working-class father was a swing-jazz trumpeter on the side during the Depression, when a little extra money went a very long way. One of Eastwood&amp;#039;s best movies, 1988&amp;#039;s Bird, is a portrait of the bebop saxophone genius Charlie Parker, who died young from a heroin overdose. And Eastwood doesn&amp;#039;t just love music, he makes it, composing the music for six of his movies, including Million Dollar Baby, J. Edgar, and Mystic River. The music in Jersey Boys is the requisite raucous, in-your-face Broadway fare. But it&amp;#039;s down to the movie&amp;#039;s director that those songs weave gracefully in and out of the story here, while a deeper narrative unfolds with its own subtle rhythm. This article appeared in the July 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a12734/jersey-boys-movie-review/?src=rss>