Critics reviews

Some critics have labeled Eastwood's direction in Jersey Boys lazy or wooden, but I'd wager it's downright radical. The film operates on a deceptive formal level that addresses a series of parallels between blind ambition, success, and ego in comparison to the darker experiences of those outside the main characters' orbit.

...Eastwood has managed to stamp his own personality all over material that one would assume he is completely wrong for. The film meanders through the hits, detouring via its four fourth-wall breaking voiceovers that begin often in the middle of a scene without breaking the shot, suddenly shifting the weight of themise-en-scène in a way that feels genuinely fresh.

Each moment of his new film Jersey Boys [is] at once being driven into the future, fame, success, regrets, while simultaneously becoming nearly a dream, a dream running simultaneously to the events it imagines. Everything is made memory the instant it happens. It isn't exactly fantasy, not quite melancholy, not jubilation. It's a chorus of voices and emotions.

When the film turns to Valli's relationship to his wayward teenaged daughter, Francine (Freya Tingley), its depiction of the late Sixties Village street scene is so wholly inauthentic and plasticine that I half expected a visit to The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel from Siegel's 1968Coogan's Bluff. Suffice it to say that Jersey Boys is a quite uneven movie with flashes of something better.

Eastwood is interested in the creation of a mainstream that may be the product of a mass-culture industry but that nonetheless provides the comforting, enduring, and sustaining illusion that it arose spontaneously like grass sprouting from the cracks in the pavement. For Eastwood, the question is both how that illusion was established, how it was lost, and at what price.

The modest charms of Clint Eastwood's thoroughly enjoyable and admittedly lightweight musical "Jersey Boys"... lie in the fact that it isn't trying to outdo its many predecessors... When the characters in "Jersey Boys" break the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience – sometimes mid-song — they're acknowledging that we're wised up about what's likely to happen in this kind of story, especially to a buncha galoots who can't quite leave the projects of Belleville, New Jersey, behind.

The unfortunate trade-off of Eastwood's efficient, real-deal classical direction is his stubborn commitment to the script. In this case, that means eliding everything artistically interesting that the group ever did (like, say, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette) and loading the back end of the movie with a mushy hit-by-hit structure that probably worked like gangbusters on stage, but drags on screen.

Jersey Boys" is a strange movie, and it's a Clint Eastwood enterprise, both reasons to see it. For those with a love of doo-wop, it also provides a toe-tapping, ear-worming stroll down rock 'n' roll memory lane that dovetails with that deeply cherished American song and dance about personal triumph over adversity through hard work, tough times and self-sacrifice. It's a redemption narrative that's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

What the director eloquently conveys throughout Jersey Boys is the sense of the work that goes into entertainment, the unglamorous and often not very fun concessions that are made in the name of having both a modicum of artistic freedom and a regular paycheck.

[The fourth wall breaking is] a half-assed gimmick that Eastwood and his screenwriters—Broadway holdovers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice—deploy haphazardly. (Valli doesn't even get his turn until the dewy-eyed final scene.) This fits the mood of the movie, though, which comes off like one of those meandering reminiscences you indulge during an extended family get-together.