Grease earns its pleasures through the songs, John Travolta’s dancing and Stockard Channing’s sharpness. The romance is thin and the sexual politics need questioning, but the performances make the evening worthwhile.
Randal Kleiser’s Grease is a lively, uneven musical, carried through a thin romance by performers who know how to hold our attention. It treats 1950s teenage life as something to dress up and perform, with little interest in making its high-school pupils look or behave like actual children. The exaggeration is often funny, and the energy is hard to resist. The trouble comes when Bronté Woodard’s screenplay asks for emotional weight without doing much work between numbers.
John Travolta makes Danny’s vanity enjoyable because he gives it such physical ease. His dancing has the confidence of someone who expects to be watched, without the laborious insistence that can make such a character unbearable. We found ourselves grinning at his relaxed swagger; it makes the showing off seem playful. Olivia Newton-John gives Sandy a sincerity that the surrounding performances sometimes lack, though she has fewer opportunities to make her character interesting when she is not singing.
Stockard Channing makes Rizzo more than another source of sharp remarks. There is an effort behind her toughness, and she lets us notice it without asking the whole film to become solemn on her behalf. Her singing is particularly affecting because she lets us hear the strain of keeping up that confidence. The broader comic playing around her is less dependable, too often demanding a laugh merely for being emphatic.
Bill Butler’s cinematography is most engaging when the dancers fill the frame, giving the group performances a bustle that the spoken scenes cannot always sustain. Philip M. Jefferies’s production design gives the cast a suitably artificial school in which to practise their adolescent poses. Albert Wolsky’s costumes help the performers announce themselves before they speak, which suits the broad characterisation. The colour and movement are enjoyable, although Randal Kleiser sometimes seems content to let a busy frame substitute for a well-staged joke.
Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s contributions to the music supply much of the pleasure, particularly when the songs expose the group’s rules about sex and popularity. A boast can sound ridiculous and still tell us why the person making it needs an audience. John F. Burnett’s editing is most persuasive in these stretches, keeping the musical exchanges lively enough to excuse some thin connective scenes. Away from the numbers, the gaps in the storytelling are harder to ignore, and 110 minutes occasionally feels generous.
As a screen musical, it gives the performers enough freedom to make its thin material enjoyable. Bronté Woodard’s screenplay is much less convincing about why these people ought to be together, and the sexual double standards are treated too readily as a source of jokes. The knowing exaggeration cannot excuse every lazy assumption about boys and girls, particularly when the romance asks us to take it seriously. Go for the singing and dancing; keep a little scepticism for the courtship.
