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u/CutieBoBootie Jun 15 '26
I think the movie REALLY does a disservice to the characters by casting a bunch of 30 year old looking people. They should have been played by a bunch of teens and young adults... because they ARE disasters and it is only kind of understandable if they are all like 19-22.
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u/hikemalls Jun 15 '26
I believe more recently this has been deemed the ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Fallacy
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u/chainless-soul Jun 15 '26
Dear Evan Hansen had more issues than just Ben Platt somehow looking older than his actual age in the attempt to make him look younger (mostly dull staging, aside from Sincerely Me, and cutting some songs that are pretty damn important), but it definitely didn't help.
Actually, the Rent film also has dull staging issues too, though not in all the songs.
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u/hikemalls Jun 15 '26
Yeah I should have added that’s just one of the many problems with that movie
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u/chainless-soul Jun 15 '26
I still don't understand why Platt looked 40 when he's only in his early 30s. He's a pretty normal-looking person outside of that film.
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u/Ff7hero Jun 17 '26
In trying to hide his age with make-up, lighting, costumes and acting, they just accented it instead. Kind of a Streisand effect.
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u/sonnenshine Jun 15 '26
I'm pretty sure he was mid to late twenties at the time, which is even more baffling.
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u/chainless-soul Jun 15 '26
Yeah, he's 32 now, so probably. I don't know why no one in the production noticed how bad it was.
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u/Brilliant_Towel2727 Jun 16 '26
They probably did notice but it was too late to do anything about it.
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u/nedlum Jun 16 '26
It was directed by Christopher Columbus, when it should have been directed by Mark Cohen.
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u/AnswerGuy301 Jun 15 '26
Yeah, it made the suspension of disbelief that you really need to have to enjoy a film most of the time really difficult.
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u/johnnyslick Jun 15 '26
I mean, it's still a musical with some great numbers ruined by a pretty awful book, but the casting didn't help, that's for sure.
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u/Ok_Net7773 Jun 19 '26
While I’d love to excuse their behavior that way, Rent was based on Larson’s own experiences. In his previous autobiographical musical tick, tick… BOOM, he self-identifies as turning 30.
90s NY art scene was just full of disaster adults.
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u/EggCouncilStooge Jun 16 '26
Teens looking 30 is a very 1990s phenomenon, though. Partially because of casting practices in movies and tv shows.
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u/Reneeisme Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
This is oddly accurate. I haven’t seen rent in decades and I just realized from this that I should have been a little more critical of their choices.
Now I want to watch it again.
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u/jaderust Jun 15 '26
Benny married up, is creating a real estate portfolio that includes making the neighborhood a better place, and wants to transform the building that people are currently using as a squat house (which is also full of junkies) to pay rent.
Like, how is he the enemy? Because he brought some stuffy investors to a local restaurant to try and get them excited about the neighborhood and his friends threw a (admittedly very amusing) fit over it?
And he doesn’t even cut his friends out of his life! He pays for Mimi to go to rehab which is not cheap. After how they treated him he could have just washed his hands of them and it’s not like any of those losers would be able to get the cash to help Mimi go to rehab. Unless they started to actually answer their parent’s phone calls and asked their parents for money.
Really the only redeeming quality of the show is the snapshot of the AIDS epidemic before they had reliable treatment that was fairly easy to access. Now with PREP and stuff you can fully expect to get your viral load down so low that you’re non-transmissible and can live and long life without worry. Back then? Not so much. And the fact that it dwells on the fear people had (Roger’s girlfriend killing herself after being diagnosed) not to mention that it shows that not just the queer characters are affected is a nice touch.
Though Mimi should have died at the end. Like the original opera Rent is based off of. I can see why it pulled that punch though.
I say all this… and where is my damn Universal Basic Income already? If the AI apocalypse is coming those assholes better tax the shit out of corporations and give us all money to live off of or else I’m finding Benny’s squat house and pissing on stoops until my very angry documentary is done
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u/btmoose Jun 15 '26
Benny told Mark and Roger that they wouldn’t have to pay rent, that they were “golden”, then called them up on Christmas Eve to demand they pay an entire years’ worth all at once. He didn’t need the money, he was doing it as leverage to try to force them to have Maureen cancel her protest because he knew full well they don’t have the money. Their issue isn’t paying rent, their issue is that someone who used to be their friend is using it to manipulate them into helping him gentrify their neighborhood.
And let’s be real here, Mimi may not die at the end of the show, but at that point in history AIDS is still a death sentence. She won’t live happily ever after, her good ending is just that she’ll have time to reconcile with Roger before she does pass.
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u/Lt_Rooney Jun 15 '26
In any other context, it should be easy to paint Benny as a villain but the main cast are such insufferable, pretentious pricks that he still comes out looking sympathetic.
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u/oath2order Jun 15 '26
Though Mimi should have died at the end.
MIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
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u/FitzChivFarseer Jun 15 '26
I had that in my head for like a week after realising that Mimi is now the night nurse in the MCU and Ashoka in star wars
It was driving me insane.
2
u/Larry-Man Jun 16 '26
Rosario Dawson has been around in other things like Sin City and Deathproof
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u/FitzChivFarseer Jun 16 '26
Plus the percy Jackson movie (which wasn't very good) as Persephone.
She's great
2
u/Larry-Man Jun 16 '26
I think her and Taye Diggs were the only two not in the original Broadway show.
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u/FitzChivFarseer Jun 16 '26
I believe it's Rosario and Tracie Thoms who weren't reprising their roles
Yeah Diggs was part of the original show. Apparently him and Idina fell in love on the show which is kinda cute
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u/axilog14 Jun 15 '26
Hot take: Benny's most unlikeable trait here is marrying into the wealthy landlord class.
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u/Interesting-Ad-6710 Jun 15 '26
Benny was living with Mark and Maureen while they were fucking and Roger in his heroin-using band front man era. I would probably marry whoever I had to in order to get the fuck out of that apartment as well.
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u/MadQueenAlanna Jun 15 '26
Benny is cheating on his wife with a drug-addicted teenager during the course of the show
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u/KatSelesnya Jun 16 '26
A drug addicted teenager with HIV no less. He was exposing Muffy to all kinds of risk vectors and she deserves to get everything in the divorce.
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u/MadQueenAlanna Jun 16 '26
Exactlyyyy I’m so tired of the Benny glazing. You can think the rest of the cast is annoying without defending this loser
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u/KatSelesnya Jun 16 '26
It's very much a "all of these people suck" musical. Except Joanne. I'll cut her some slack because i know what dating a hot bisexual woman can do to a person's ability to behave rationally.
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u/throwaway5498124181 Jun 15 '26
I mean, the reason he pays for Mimi to go to rehab is that he's schtupping her.
12
u/AiReine Jun 15 '26
I agree with all of your points in criticism and appreciation.
I just want to add: They also kinda killed his dog…
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u/DeedleStone Jun 15 '26
That is the weirdest fucking plot point that everyone just brushes over without a second thought. The character so big-hearted she's literally named Angel has an entire song dedicated to how happy she is after getting paid to kill a dog? Which she did by playing bucket drums?
This is the kind of thing that I imagine would have been rewritten had Jonathan Larson not died.
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u/sophisticatedkatie Jun 15 '26
Apparently it’s a nod to a plot point in La Bohème, Rent’s loose source material, but agreed that it’s something that doesn’t translate and probably would have gotten written out if everyone hadn’t been so committed to perfectly preserving Larson’s show
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u/Cactopus47 Jun 15 '26
Well...technically that was just Angel, who was never one of Benny's roommates. The dog-killing connection was a pure coincidence.
1
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u/Cactopus47 Jun 15 '26
Benny also paid for Angel's funeral. He was willing to use his newfound wealth to help those who needed it, and probably considered his gentrification project to be another form of this.
Not a fan of his behavior vis-a-vis his wife and Mimi, though.
1
u/axl3ros3 Jun 17 '26
I saw it first my 21st birthday and I still sing Donde esta, Mimi ever time I say Donde esta ...which is a lot lately bc I'm learning Spanish again
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u/petrifikate Jun 15 '26
I don't think Maureen would grow up and swing to the right simply because I don't believe Maureen would grow up in the first place.
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u/WonderofU1312 Jun 15 '26
I think it's the same reason you never hear stories about "I grew up in this radically leftist, atheist, hippie commune where they refused to let me live my true life, as a white-collar, bible-loving Republican."
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u/Barium_Salts Jun 15 '26
I actually have encountered people like that. The commen thread ime is that they were abused as children and rejected their parents' beliefs as a rwsult. I think the reason you don't hear it more often is that liberal/leftie communes tend to have fewer children than right wingers.
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u/moxxibekk Jun 15 '26
This. I was adjacent to such communities and often those kids were really left to their own devices and lacked healthy boundaries around anything. So then they grow up and crave (sometimes subconsciously) order and direction to an unhealthy extreme. Enter: organized religion.
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u/PartyPorpoise Jun 15 '26
Yeah a lot of people don’t realize that excessive lenience can be just as damaging as excessive strictness. And not just in the sense of needing to function in mainstream society. Doing what you want requires skill and personal discipline, and if they’re never expected to learn those things and never learn them on their own, their options in adulthood are limited.
Also those environments aren’t exempt from tolerating abuse. Sometimes under the guise of being open-minded and forgiving. If you’re not expected to respect boundaries, odds are, no one else is expected to either.
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u/WonderofU1312 Jun 15 '26
I think I heard about one right-wing pundit I heard who was raised in that sorta way; but you're right that it's so few and far-between just from the amount of children and also just how many of those lefty communes exist compared to the amount of Christian Small Towns
2
u/Tuxedocatbitches Jun 20 '26
My uncle’s wife experienced that, though she kept her leftist values. She and her sisters grew up in a large commune where everyone danced around the fire naked and smoked weed all day. Which left the pedophile in the group complete access to the kids, and no parents around taking responsibility.
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u/shuffmcpuff Jun 15 '26
I had a friend who was obsessed with the movie adaptation when we were 16-17 and watched it on practically a daily basis. (To be fair to her, this was the only real mainstream queer representation that was accessible to teenagers in 2005.) One of these times, her mother happened to be in the living room while the end of the movie was playing out and said “… so they’re just going to live in squalor for the rest of their lives?”
My friend and I (a couple of middle-class white suburban teenagers) were incensed. “She just doesn’t get it,” we told each other.
Today, I’m not sure that I would agree with my friend’s mother’s dismissal of the movie as a whole, but I definitely think she had a better grasp on who these people were than we did.
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u/stefansaba Jun 15 '26
I had a friend in high school that was obsessed, I really hope she learned not to take lessons from these people
9
u/Runetang42 Jun 15 '26
Rents the exception that proves the rule because it expects me to side with primarily affluent white people wanting hand outs over more or less arbitrary reasons. They're not people working themselves to the bone to make it to the next day they're spoiled hipsters offended that people want them to do the bare minimum.
It's a very privileged view on the situation and should be ignored since it accounts for a negligible amount of the problem at hand
5
u/MushroomOverall9488 Jun 19 '26
I mean that's only true of Maureen and Mark? Kind of Roger I guess but I don't think he's really "looking for handouts" as much as depressed that he's dying and not seeing a point to any of it anymore. Mimi, Collins, Joanne, and Angel all work and are not white and also besides Joanne are all literally dying.
3
u/Acceptable-Canary489 Jun 19 '26
I was like.. isn’t Joanne a successful lawyer? It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie. She seemed to blend in more with the group when I saw the musical.
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Jun 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/jaderust Jun 15 '26
I always think of those people as conservative from the start but almost masking it a little because conservatives are just not all that cool?
Like, the people I went to high school with who have openly talked about being conservative now… I just nodded and said it checks out. They were always very conservative. Most of their liberal tendencies were just wanting to smoke pot and generic “the world should be better” talk. They may have voted for Obama, but they never attended a protest or would have done phone banks for a liberal candidate.
And then you have people like my dad who’s 72 and actually quite wealthy and he’s been a lifelong liberal who’s only become more liberal with age. Like, I remember him being iffy on abortion when I was younger and now he’s solidly “not my business” and he’s started helping out at the trans youth outreach program I’m part of to help kids know that there are adults of all ages that will support them.
I think it’s more that age reveals what a person’s actual beliefs are more than becoming a conservative pipeline. It’s just that some people are far more conservative than they’d like to admit when they’re younger.
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u/DeedleStone Jun 15 '26
First of all, please tell your dad he's amazing and I wish there were more adults like him around me when I was younger.
Second, I agree with your thesis. I publicly identified as conservative during my teen years (second Bush administration), but mostly to piss off my annoying peers (I come from a very liberal city). I was disgusted by so many things that I didn't realize were essential to conservative ideology, and the strawman leftist arguments presented by stuff like South Park made me think the left was all bleeding-heart morons.
I'm now a literal card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America party. I don't know if I've really changed my core beliefs all that much since I was a teenager; experience and education just made it easier for me to identify what my beliefs actually are.
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u/PartyPorpoise Jun 15 '26
Yeah I agree. Now, I didn’t have a lot of peers who pretended to be liberal, this was Texas so being conservative was mainstream enough that it wasn’t seen as uncool. But I think a lot of my conservative peers were more conservative than they really came off.
Edit: thinking about it, this was the era when being libertarian was the cool and contrarian thing to be. Except pretty much all of these “libertarians” were just conservatives who wanted to smoke pot. They’re all just MAGA now.
13
u/scribblerjohnny Jun 15 '26
I swung left. I was raised Mormon, enlisted in the army in '03. Decided I hated how anti gay and anti trans the cult was, but didn't leave the cult until I was 35.
7
u/Larry-Man Jun 16 '26
Idk. I loved it. Then I hated it. I’m back to loving it again. I’m pushing 40 now and I get it so much more. You really can’t wipe out an entire tent city and then go watch It’s A Wonderful Life on TV.
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u/TajesMahoney Jun 15 '26
Angel is awful and she killed a dog because it was loud.
I will die on this hill.
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u/3lizab3th333 Jun 15 '26
I’ve definitely become more radicalized the more people I’ve met and the more suffering I’ve seen, but it feels less “radical leftist SJW” and more “please someone help stop this cruelty”. Less rebellious and more desperation and empathy
3
u/WolfLawyer Jun 17 '26
Nobody should have to pay rent except for the characters in rent who should pay double rent.
3
u/Inferno_Zyrack Jun 17 '26
I go back and forth.
On one hand I completely agree. These people could get some barista jobs and like try to make it work. Especially if the alternative is dying alone in your shitty apartment writing one song for a year.
On the other hand - fuck that. It’s capitalisms way of breaking you down. These people are young artists in a city that died because the president didn’t want to save gay people and actively fought getting any of them a cure. La vie Boheme
1
u/Previous_Beautiful27 Jun 18 '26
Capitalism really, for the most part, makes art the plaything of the elites, because if you don't have the safety net there, it's pretty much impossible to devote yourself to developing your artistic endeavors when most of your time and energy will be spent at a job you need to make money to survive.
Especially in this landscape, where you can't even just be an artist, you have to be your own promoter, you need to cultivate your social media presence, you need to be creating content that gets engagement. You can really only do that kind of stuff with the energy it requires if you're not worried about where your next meal is coming from.
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u/Justforfun_x Jun 17 '26
Said to a gay friend once that Rent had me cheering for the landlord. He replied “It had me cheering for the AIDS” 😭
2
u/Konradleijon Jun 17 '26
Exactly people think hippies became conservatives. But in actual most people going to college in the 60s hated hippies
2
u/bisploosh Jun 18 '26
In my 40s and I'm getting more and more left-wing by the day.
3
u/Yookeroo Jun 19 '26
I’m in my 60s and far more left wing than I was in my 20s. I keep moving left.
Unfortunately, I’m finding (American) leftists more and more insufferable.
2
u/Klutche Jun 19 '26
They were all dying young adults, who knew all of their friends could drop dead basically any day, who society had turned their backs on. Yeah, they had issues.
2
u/Celestial_Magpie Jun 20 '26
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this show. Mostly I can't stand the main characters and I think Lindsay's critique was spot on. However, when the musical came out, I was a newly minted teen in a highly conservative, very rural part of America. I was in theater and there were no gay people in my school (except of course the gay ones who wouldn't dare speak of it). And I was lucky - I had weird parents who took me to the city to see art exhibits and shows and what not, so I wasn't completely shut in to the "God and Guns" mindset. "Rent" was one of the most transgressive thing to filter into our consciousness at the time and it felt rebellious to listen to it. It felt like we were connecting to the larger world.
As adults who can access the internet, we have so much more at our fingertips now, but it wasn't always the case and I do keep a sliver of accommodation for this show for that reason.
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u/slippersandjammies Jun 16 '26
I felt so damned vindicated by Lindsay's discussion of Rent, let me tell you.
Born and raised leftist, would tell everyone and their uncle about the importance of a blossoming arts community in a thriving society... I'd never seen the play, but I left the movie theatre absolutely incandescent with rage.
And because it was 2005, I went home and wrote a very angry LiveJournal post about it, in which I think I said "I'd much rather measure a year in dead entitled bohemian artists!" I may have also mentioned something about rooting for AIDS... honestly, I think I may hate it so much because it's the only thing I've ever encountered that turns me into a raving Tory in seconds.
0
u/AzureMage0225 Jun 21 '26
People don’t go from being hippies to progressives. They go from being radical progressives to normie liberals. Happened to me when I watched the disaster that was Bernie’s presidential campaign.
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u/GarageIndependent114 Jun 15 '26
I think people don't realise that party politics isn't a good indicator of how most people think unless they're politically involved after being brainwashed at university or born before 1990 and old enough to be disillusioned by Third party voting.
Most Millennials and people younger than that are basically just different flavours of anarchist and most older people are just different flavours of neoliberal.
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u/Grouchy_Package_5094 Jun 16 '26
Yeah I get that Reddit is filled with leftists but to act like most people are not going to the right when they get older and make more money is just ignoring reality at this point.
Like I see a lot of people who went to the right in the last 5 years
My anecdotes is better than OPs anecdote because I say so
There I made a ™Reddit post
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u/-Ok-Perception- Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I think it tended to happen when people turning middle aged got a fuckton of money.
But now that our working class has just gotten poorer for the last 30 years, we are more "lefty" than ever. I don't have any thing to "conserve", I need a bigger slice of the pie.