Each morning, theater director Joe Gideon takes his pills, eye drops and cigarettes to return back to show business. He is busy between staging a new Broadway musical and finishing the long-overdue film about a stand-up comedian. His private life and health thus suffer: he barely sees his ex-wife and daughter Michelle, whereas he constantly sleeps with new women who want to be dancers in the production. Eventually, the exhausted Joe suffers a heart attack, so the production is postponed for four months. From the hospital bed, Joe has hallucinations of the new stage production, and then dies.
Excellent "All That Jazz" is a burn-out story about artists who are so fascinated and absorbed by creating art that real life just gets in their way. The 4th and penultimate movie by choreographer Bob Fosse, who died only eigth years later, is a surreal felliniesque collection of episodes and stories, yet they all surprisingly ring true and are recognizable because of Fosse's own autobiographical moments which are universal, regardless of how cocooned they are in the abstract: Joe's movie about a stand-up comedian is an obvious allegory on Fosse's "Lenny", whereas several observations about struggling actresses trying to make it, only for Joe (brilliant Roy Scheider) to tell them they are not good enough, speak some bitter truths about show business. The biggest flaw are the last 30 minutes which drown in excess hallucinatory musical sequences, which should have been either cut or reduced to several minutes, since they drag "All That Jazz" into an overlong movie.
Fosse, a former dancer and choreographer, cannot resist not to insert numerous outstandingly choreographed dance and move scenes with style (around 33 minutes into the film, Fosse's alter ego Joe even has a dance choreography holding his 12-year daughter in his hands), which are fabulous to look at, yet he also has a great sense for snappy dialogues ("Don't bullshit and bullshiter."; "You shot 82 days on a 65-day schedule! On a four-month editing schedule, you've gone seven months! Joey, God made the entire world in six days. He didn't go on overtime once."; "Nothing I ever do is good enough. Not beautiful enough, it's not funny enough, it's not deep enough, it's not anything enough. Now, when I see a rose, that's perfect. I want to look up to God and say: "How the hell did you do that?"). The cinematography has some great shot compositions, managing to make even some normal scenes look engaging, whereas the fast cuts and metafilm touches (at one point, while a sick Joe is in bed, a healthy Joe shows up to hold a film clapperboard and direct a movie about his Broadway musical) not only make the movie seem modern, but also stay true to its theme of the hyperactive Joe who is exhausted by creating a movie and staging a play simultaneously, yet at the same time, it is the only thing that keeps him going in his life: it's both his biggest stimulant and his biggest toxicant.
Grade:+++
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