JOJO DANCER, YOUR LIFE IS CALLING. Directed by Richard Pryor; written by Rocco Urbisci, Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor; produced by Richard Pryor for Columbia. Starring Richard Pryor. Rated R (language, drug use, a little nudity).
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The only good thing about dying, I've always thought, is that you get to see the story of your life pass before your eyes. Hopefully like a movie done the style of a director you admire. The conception of this moment as a movie is the main idea of JoJo Dancer. We can only hope that when the time comes, our movies make a little more sense than this comedy/melodrama.
JoJo is a wealthy comic, whose professional life is marvelously successful. On the personal side, however, he's a mess. Lonely, depressed and unable to fight his drug and alcohol addictions, he loses control of one of his concoctions and ends up critically burned.
Hovering between life and death, JoJo's spirit, before this apparently a silent partner in his life's work, decides to delve into the past, trying to understand how this could have happened. So most of JoJo Dancer is a flashback, with an adult JoJo talking things over with important people from his past—including himself.
The idea is a good one, and in some scenes, particularly early on, it works well. But eventually the complexity of JoJo's life gets away from the screenplay. It's hard to know how much to blame JoJo for his predicament, for one thing. In some past scenes, he's a victimized innocent, while in others, he's an unpleasant jerk. In addition, the pace of the last half or so of the movie is jumpy and disjointed. It's so hard to follow that, just when the story should be the most engrossing, the viewer loses interest.
Pryor's performance is as uneven as the story. He's compelling in some of the dramatic scenes. Mostly when he's alone, however. His co-stars are almost all excellent as the minor characters surrounding JoJo. He just doesn't interact well with them. I'd like to see some of these minor roles expanded, especially JoJo's grandmother (Carmen McRae) and his first wife (Fay Hauser). E'lon Cox as little JoJo is also just great.
The comedy Pryor does is up to his usual high standards. Of course, if you don't like his style in straight comedies, then the bits he does here won't redeem JoJo Dancer for you. But if you're a Pryor fan, you'll enjoy them.
However, there just isn't enough of what he does best—comedy—and there's too much of him trying to be what he's not—a dramatic actor. The focus of the movie is relentlessly on JoJo and he just can't hold our interest.
Unfortunately for this movie, it begs to be compared with All That Jazz, one of my favorites, which has a similar theme. This 1979 movie was a semi-autobiography of its director, Bob Fosse. And beginning JoJo Dancer with an accident just like the one which seriously injured Pryor tells us right away that JoJo is a kind of alter ego for his director.
But All That Jazz flowed well, in spite of musical interludes and surrealistic dream sequences. Each scene led logically and artistically to the next. This isn't the case with JoJo Dancer.
If you want to see a movie about self-destruction, rent Fosse's. And if you like Richard Pryor, rent a tape of some of his stand-up comedy.
Footnote for viewers sensitive about vulgar language: the dialogue in JoJo Dancer is as raunchy as Pryor's comedy routines (which, if you don't know, are pretty raunchy). It will need a lot of voicing over to play on network T.V.
May 21, 1986