Cast: Mariah Carey, Max Beesley, Ann Magnuson, Shawntae Harris, Tia Texada
Director: Vondie Curtis-Hall
Producer: Laurence Mark
Screenplay: Kate Lanier, based on a story by Cheryl L. West
Cinematography: Geoffrey Simpson
Music: Terence Blanchard
U.S. Distributor: 20th Century Fox
All that glitters definitely isn't gold. In this case, it's more like soot - painfully written, horribly acted, and awkwardly directed. Trapped in a darkened theater enduring this excuse for entertainment, I couldn't decide which of those three characteristics was executed worse. At least there's enough blame to go around. Sometimes when a movie misfires, it's difficult to figure out who was responsible. On this occasion, it's easy - everyone whose name appears in the credits. For a tearjerker with modest ambitions, Glitter is excruciatingly inept. Even in this dismal motion picture climate, this is about the last thing you would want to stumble into at the multiplex.
Glitter is obviously a star vehicle for Mariah Carey, and its release should force Hollywood executives to re-consider the flawed concept that the success of a performer in one arena of pop culture will automatically translate to another. The list of non-rap singers who have forged effective acting careers is relatively short. Most of these wannabe-thespian divas turn out to be like Madonna and Whitney Houston, giving performances that seem designed exclusively to torture audiences. Mariah Carey falls into that camp. She may have a 1000-watt smile, but she definitely cannot act. Fingers on a blackboard are more appealing than her attempts to inhabit a character.
Why Mariah Carey in the first place? This movie would have made sense half-a-decade ago, when Carey was hot. Now she's on the road to oblivion, having been replaced by younger women who show more cleavage and less restraint. There's no way that a movie as bad as Glitter can resurrect a sputtering career (and it hasn't helped that "exhaustion" has taken Carey out of the public spotlight for more than a month, causing a release delay and the collapse of the movie's publicity machine). The target audience for Glitter is obviously Carey die-hards (would anyone else bother?), and I'm not sure how many of them exist today.
Glitter, inexplicably set during the 1980s, is the rags-to-riches story of a young woman who, through lots of hard work and a little luck, hits the big time. Much like The Jazz Singer, which featured the previous worst performance by a pop star in a motion picture (Neil Diamond), Glitter realizes that it won't attract any audience without plenty of songs. Unfortunately, everything sung by Carey sounds uninspired and generic, and the lip synching is awful. This is one of those instances when a song-laden soundtrack does nothing to increase the appeal of a movie.
Carey plays (and I use that term loosely) Billie Franklin, an orphan who grows up to be a backup singer to a rising pop star. Dice (Max Beesley), a popular New York club D.J., discovers Billie's secret - not only does she do backup for the star, she ghost sings for her as well. So Dice buys Billie's contract for $100,000 and, together, they launch her career. Eventually, he gets jealous of her success, and they break up. There's also a lame subplot about her attempting to find her mother, whom she hasn't seen in more than 10 years.
Actor-turned-director Vondie Curtis-Hall, in his second outing behind the camera (his debut was 1997's Gridlock'd - a far better film), uses an absurd number of camera tricks (including frequent, random slo-mo shots), all to no avail. One wonders why Curtis-Hall agreed to direct this - the material is so bad that it defeats him, making him look incompetent in the process. Maybe he believed he could do something with Glitter - if that's the case, he was badly mistaken.
One curious thing about this film is the lack of a "name" actor to balance out Carey's inexperience. In the aforementioned The Jazz Singer, Neil Diamond recruited none other than Laurence Olivier (okay, so it's arguably the worst performance of Olivier's career, but he's still in the movie) to take on a supporting role. Here, Carey's co-star is Max Beesley, who is bad enough not to completely embarrass Carey by comparison.
There are enough howlingly bad lines of dialogue in Glitter to provide occasional breaks of unintentional laughter, but, even with those interruptions, this movie is agonizing to sit through. Occasionally, I see a chunk of cinematic debris that strikes so many wrong chords that I can't figure out how the project was greenlighted in the first place. This is one of those incidents. Glitter lacks anything resembling a sparkle, and, as a movie star, Mariah Carey is the equivalent of a black hole.
© 2001 James Berardinelli