Clear Blue Tuesday

Clear Blue Tuesday

105 Minutes

There are three very important things you need to know about Elizabeth Lucas’ Clear Blue Tuesday before deciding to go see it. The first thing is that it’s a musical. Now I can hear you saying, “So what? The movie musical is a quintessentially American art form with a long and storied history!” To which I would reply, “Yes, but let’s face it: not everybody’s cup of tea.” Especially the “rock’n'roll musical” subgenre, of which this film is a definite example. So just keep that in mind. It’s a musical – people are continually breaking into song. The second thing that one needs to know about Clear Blue Tuesday before sitting down in the theater is that the script and songs were collaboratively written by the cast members themselves, to wildly varying success. Which is similar to another recent movie that, much like Clear Blue Tuesday, was collectively written by its cast, prominently features music, takes place in New York City and deals with the trials and tribulations of a number of lonesome souls desperately trying to heal and connect: John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus from 2006. So you should know going in that Clear Blue Tuesday is much like Shortbus, only without all the hardcore fucking. And the third thing you simply must know about Clear Blue Tuesday before seeing it is that it is a rock’n'roll, collectively and collaboratively written, no-hardcore-fucking movie musical about September 11th.

I am going to pause here for a moment while that sinks in.

It is a musical about 9/11! Which is, as I think you’ll agree, sort of a problem. They took what is arguably the most traumatic event in recent American history and made a movie about it featuring lots of singin’ and a-dancin’. But hey, Rent is a musical about AIDS, right? And people seem to like that. So why not 9/11? It is just conceivable that Lucas and her cast of musical theater hopefuls could have made an emotionally resonant and cathartic film dealing with the devastating effects that September 11th, 2001 had upon the lives of a number of New York City residents. With, you know, power ballads in it. But unfortunately Clear Blue Tuesday is kind of a mess. A well-meaning mess, but a mess all the same.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Lucas and her cast had only the best intentions in mind before undergoing this project. Many of the actors drew from their own personal experiences of that day, so one would assume that the film took on an extra layer of meaning for those involved. Clear Blue Tuesday, if it is anything, is a very earnest film. It certainly wears its heart on its sleeve – a big old maudlin heart, just dripping with bathos and sentiment, pinned up for all to see.

The film is about 11 New Yorkers whose criss-crossing paths connect and bounce off one another over the span of 2001 to 2006. The film, whose title refers to the weather conditions on that fateful day in ’01, leaps forward in yearly increments, showing us brief slices of time (always on a Tuesday) in the history of its characters’ lives as they attempt to take up again the humanity they had lost on the day the towers fell. What was most frustrating about the movie was that fleetingly, in between the holes in its vastly woven tapestry, a much better film could at times be glimpsed. But by deciding to have such a large cast, each with their own individual arcs, by continually cross cutting between scenes and storylines, and most crucially, by deciding to include much of the expository and character-defining information within the lyrics of the none-too-memorable songs, Lucas managed to create what amounts to a shallow and surface-level film that includes some fine performances, to be sure, but contains little of the depth and emotional richness that its subject matter demands.

There is Daniel (Jeremy Schonfeld), a would-be writer and former musician whose girlfriend was killed in the attack. He is attempting to write a screenplay about her with little success. He is married to Reena (Julia Danao-Salkin), a photographer and mother to his daughter, troubled by her husband’s continual pining for his dead love. Into their lives comes Syd (whose professional name is, and I am not making this up, Brother Love), a former bandmate of Daniel’s who is still living the rock’n'roll dream. One night at a club he hooks up with Sam (Cassandra Kubinski), an out of work actress and roommate to Etta (Erin Hill), a sci-fi loving electric harpist who is searching for the man that can appreciate her devotion to “Star Trek Voyager’s” Capt. Janeway. Sam works with and eventually falls in love with Jain (Vedant Gokhale), a young Indian man who just can’t seem to hold a job (presumably as a result of racial prejudice resulting from the attack, although this is in no way made clear). Caroline (Jan O’Dell) a former co-worker of Reena’s, is suffering as a direct result of injuries sustained on that day. Her long-lost son Jack (Greg Naughton) becomes a homeless troubadour after being fired by Kyle (Asa Somers) early in the film. Kyle lives with Rose (Becca Ayers), a painter whose work drastically changes after 9/11. And through it all is Ricardo (Robi Hager), the Mexican concierge in Kyle and Rose’s building, who, well, I’m not really sure what Ricardo is doing in this movie. He’s just sort of there. But he does sing this one song in Spanish (without subtitles), which was totally random. All of the characters finally meet at Rose’s gallery show, overlooking Ground Zero, in 2006.

Interwoven throughout the film are a number of songs, which, as I mentioned, were written by the performers themselves. The songs were…well, the songs were pretty bad. Accompanying the songs were music video sequences that strongly resembled the ones you’d see at a Karaoke bar – artlessly shot, ploddingly staged and with cheesy special effects. The songs do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of plot development and character building. Oftentimes a character would burst into song before they were even introduced. The lyrics were supposed to establish who they were, what they wanted out of life, how they were affected by 9/11 – all in the span of three unmemorable minutes. Before we even get to know who these people are we are supposed to somehow care about them. Lucas got this exactly backwards – songs in a musical should amplify and expand the emotional inner lives of characters we have already come to know. By reversing this, the audience is left cast adrift, struggling to piece together character traits through the words of a sudden pop song.

Lucas struggled to keep connections and relationships clear in her audience’s mind. Besides for the Magnolia-like coincidences that linked them, Lucas would frequently cross-cut within a musical number, showing what some of the other characters were doing at that moment. This was not a very successful technique – by interrupting a song whose informational content was already hard to follow with a three second snippet of another character, like, sitting on a couch or looking out of a window or something, Lucas only further managed to undermine any kind of audience connection.

The cast was for the most part very strong. Stand-out performances include a nice comedic turn by Gokhale as Jain and Hill’s Etta, whose geeky sci-fi persona strongly reminded me of “The Guild’s” Felicia Day. O’Dell turned in a dignified and subtle performance as Caroline, an older woman who learns to live again after tragedy has struck. It’s just too bad that the actors’ work was for the most part obscured and dissipated by the very structure of the film itself.

Clear Blue Tuesday is many things. It is a drama, a comedy, a musical. It is a collaborative experiment in filmmaking. It is a eulogy and a celebration and a portrait of the city I love. What it is not, unfortunately, is a successful film. A noble effort, maybe, but one that falls far short of the mark.

by Shannon Gramas