Xanadu spirits you away with video flair
Xanadu, an entertaining but mindless movie, is perhaps the most openly escapist Hollywood picture since the Great Depression.
Olivia Newton-John, a breathy, pleasant pop singer and passable actress dances a little, sips around on miler skates and sings several several songs. One is the title number from this album-movie. It’s a four-costume-change number.
Though second billed, Gene Kelly is still as debonair as they come, whether he’s sentimentally recalling a lost love, tootling on a clarinet, or, more to the point, hoofing. Kelly executes some fairly simple tapwork in one extended sequence with Ms. Newton-John and builds to some brief but complex shuffling near the picture’s end.
And then there’s Michael Beck, whose big-nosed, pouty-mouthed, sunken cheeked looks makes him a leading man in the street-tough tradition of Mick Jagger. He doesn’t sing or dance. He is Xanadu’s sex symbol. (Even with her blouse slid off one shoulder, Ma. Newton-John never moves past pert on the sensuality scale)
Beck was the gang leader in The Warriors. Here he’s a talented painter who goes back to work in a record company’s advertising shop because he can’t find inspiration when he works at art for art’s sake. Ms. Newton-John is supposed to remedy that, I think. She’s a muse set free from an outdoor mural when Beck tears up his last freelance sketch and tomes it out the window.
With eight sisters, she dances out of the painting in an electronically enhanced number. The dancers are framed in colored bars of light, and they appear and disappear and streak off in special lighting effects that testify to director Robert Greenwald’s mastery of video tricks as a TV moviemaker.
For purposes of plot, when Ms. Newton-John gets around to moving Beck (with a kiss, she inspires him not to great art, but to partnership in a new disco called Xanadu. Instead of producing great paintings, he does great interior decorating. So much for modern values.
Kelly, the rich but purposeless other partner, puts up the cash for Xanadu. He’s a clarinet player who has been a drifter since the 1940s when he lost his inspiration - a big-band singer also played by Ms. Newton-John.
As the club is being readied for opening, the muse and the mortal fall in love. The romantic sequence features a rose, two fish and two birds, and its surprise is a secret worth keeping for now.
All is well for Beck and Ms. Newton-John until the eve of Xanadu’s opening, when the couple is separated by a recall. Her work is done, and Zeus wants his muse back in the heavens.
Beck follows her, they plead for each other, Zeus seems to relent, and we’re plunged into a big production finale and gently let down with a make-of-it-what-you-will finish.
If this makes little sense, it’s OK. Xanadu is about escapism, not about sense.
Thus a dance number set in a disco duds shop as silly as that awful YMCA number in Can’t Stop the Music succeeds because it is done for fun. Xanadu never takes itself seriously. It has none of the “we are the future” screechiness of the Allan Carr picture.
The music, to these ears, is nothing special. Electric Light Orchestra, which carries the heavier rock sequences, still sounds like an overproduced amalgam of old Moody Blues and current soft-drink commercials.
Ma. Newton-John, once the Australian queen of country-pop music, is still thin-voiced and stylistically pale. She’s no Streisand. Her lack of power is most noticeable in the picture’s second half, when the action most frequently gives way to her singing.
The big band music is bouncy but clearly subservient to modern pop. In the picture’s best sequence, which cuts between a harshly lit 1940s number and an orange-filtered rock performance and then physically blends them, the new overpowers the old.
Moreover, while the ELO and Newton-John material is elaborately attributed, the big band stuff goes uncredited.
With its heavy heat, its flashy special effects, its riotous color and a script that bends time and space, Xanadu is both enveloping and exhausting. At 85 minutes, it also is blessedly short.
XANADU
A Universal release produced by Lawrence Gordon, directed by Robert Greenwald from a screenplay by Christian Danus and Marc Reid Rubel, photography by Victor J. Kemper. Cast: Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly, Michael Beck. Rated PG. At Valley theaters.
By Michael Maza