Black Hole

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GREASE

Directed by Randal Kleiser

Screenplay by Bronte Woodard

Even in 1972, when it was brand-new on Broadway (where it is still doing good business), Grease managed to look engagingly tattered and funky. It was like an old yearbook in the carton of high school memorabilia we all keep stored somewhere in the back of our lives. But there was nothing static in the show's evocation of '50s style and slang. It moved, man, to the solid beat of a score that was capable, on occasion, of affectionately parodying the emerging rock sound of that era. Grease was a marvelous entertainment, mostly because it was unpretentiously true to the times it briskly summoned up.

The movie version is everything the play was not. In an enterprise that seems to be all mistakes, the basic one may just be that Director Randal Kleiser, who is 30, doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. He has no feel for the times when kids were trying to resolve the contradictions between an inherited style of surviving adolescence and the radically different, new possibilities. Pat Boone and Elvis Presley, the malt shop and the rock concert, the jalopy and the drag racer, white bucks and black leather jackets--for a while in the '50s, two ways of being a teen-ager existed side by side. The poignancy of Grease derived from that juxtaposition: Can sweet Sandy, representing the Sandra Dee side of the coin, find happiness with dangerous Danny, the dark, flip side of it? Kleiser simply flattens out this conflict. It is possible, of course, that Olivia Newton-John does not have it within her to portray a girl deeply tempted to break out of her square cultural mold, but we know that John Travolta has the stuff to do Danny wonderfully. It seems criminal not to use the stud's drive and energy he displayed in Saturday Night Fever or even the nicely observed rebellious indifference he delivers in Welcome Back, Kotter. All he is asked to do here is stand around and smile sweetly, thus leaving what amounts to a large black hole at the center of the film, into which, finally, an entire made-up universe disappears.

One is inclined to absolve Travolta, since the rest of Grease offers abundant evidence that there was no one behind the lens capable of giving him any guidance. Some of the musical numbers are staged, for no particular reason, as white-on-white stylizations, `a la Busby Berkeley, while others are shot realistically -- and sloppily -- in places like the high school lawn. Chorus members are not even given attitudes they can maintain when they are in the background of a shot. Camera work is film school simple, and movement within shots does not even reach the levels we are accustomed to in TV, whence Kleiser sprang or, more properly, stumbled. Even the lip-sync in the musical numbers is terrible.

The various pop-culture icons of the '50s (Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, Edd Byrnes, Frankie Avalon) are given nothing to say or do that is worthy of them. Still, the little shocks of recognition we feel as they make their initial appearances provide the only fleeting moments of life in a movie that has as its true subject a bygone style but is utterly devoid of that quality itself.

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