Seventeen years before Steve Carell swapped comedy for drama, donned a prosthetic nose dusted with cocaine and lusted after a shirtless hunk in Foxcatcher, Mike Myers did all those things and more in 54, a love letter to the New York City disco scene of the late 1970s. Despite acclaim for Myers’s snivelling performance as Steve Rubell, co-owner of the disco mecca Studio 54, this frothy movie vanished as quickly as a freshly pricked bubble.
No wonder. The theatrical version had been slashed and scarred by its executive producer Harvey Weinstein. Apparently fearful that audiences would recoil from bisexual, morally ambivalent characters, Miramax snipped almost a third from the 100-minute movie and then dispatched its writer-director, Mark Christopher, to complete half an hour of reshoots. Fully sanitised, and with Neve Campbell promoted from cameo to love interest on account of her sudden fame in Scream, 54 was fatally compromised. Now the director’s cut, which received its world premiere this week at the Berlinale, brings the picture closer to Christopher’s idea of it as a disco-era Cabaret.
In a performance indebted to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, Ryan Phillippe is witty and winningly sexy. He plays Shane, the gormless New Jersey lug who strips to the waist to gain admittance to Studio 54 and ends up sleeping his way through clientele of both genders. His eyes pop at the hedonistic delirium around him: a cherub descends from the rafters, goats and horses clip-clop through the dry ice and vials of coke are delivered to the dancefloor on silver trays. The cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski captures it all in clammy close-ups that place us cheek-to-cheek with the clubbers.
The film is a simple rags-to-riches-and-back-again story, but its strengths lie in the density of the characterisation and writing, as well as in the breezy performances. Phillippe and Myers are called upon to hit some uniquely tricky notes. When Shane’s latest conquest passes out mid-coitus, he simply carries on thrusting, distracted from the problem in hand by his own reflection in the mirror. And Myers has never played anything as complex as the moment in which Rubell tries to seduce an employee, Greg (Breckin Meyer), while drooling helplessly on a bed covered with banknotes (Greg: “I’m not gay.” Steve: “Labels!”) Salma Hayek is also a joy as the budding singer who needs only the tiniest of nudges to be persuaded to perform.
A handful of shots rescued from videotape have a degraded texture, but even that only enhances the air of melancholy. The subject matter of 54 was always bound to make it feel bittersweet. Now its own beleaguered history has fed back into that. It’s hard not to wonder how many other near-successes were killed in their cribs by callous producers. For now, 54: The Director’s Cut represents an act of jubilant resurrection. It will finally get its day in the spotlight, or beneath the glitterball.
