David Denby

‘…. A southern white woman who talked dirty onstage, [Janis Joplin] begged the audience for love in tones so palpably erotic that not even a child could have misunderstood what was going on. Her scared, acid-toned singing was a paradox of tortured phrasing and uncanny breath control. Flinging her head back, she sang rock blues not as a dignified protest against pain but as an outraged demand for release. Audiences knew what had produced that mesmerizing voice: The booze-and-drug-shadowed private life, notoriously a mess, became a rather sinister public propery, enjoyed by everyone …. [Joplin] was a woman trying to get away with a male star's swashbuckling style. By the end, Joplin had become both victim and monster, both rock martyr and old-fashioned, tantrummy, self-destructive star.

“…. The filmmakers seem eager to show up Janis/Rose as egocentric, helpless, pathetically lost: they want to punish her even though she's dead. And they've got a star, desperate to act, who goes along with that strategy: In her screen debut, Bette Midler does enough masochistic wallowing to make Susan Hayward's tear-drenched sufferings in the fifties seem restrained by comparison. Yet there are moments of tenderness and warmth in Midler's performance, and the movie as a whole is ennobled by the gallantry of a life lived at the extremes ….

“…. [T]he picture is hell to sit through …. In the concert scenes, which should release the tensions built up in us by all the bickering and suffering, we can see Bette Midler struggling hard to sing in a style alien to her, and so our emotions stay earthbound….

“Lurid and synthetically plotted … The Rose nevertheless captures something grimly fascinating--the desperation of a woman who needed to get high, stay high, and then jerk herself up, when she was past the point of exhaustion, to still another high. "Drug, sex, rock and roll!" chants Rose at a concert, and Midler's performance shows you the hell of a life in which nothing else matters. What a storm of acting! Midler loads her own brassy, elbow-swinging, big-mama sluttishness on top of Janis's childlike egocentricity, and the results are emotionally kaleidoscopic, draining, yet clear as a series of trumpet blasts. A natural actress who puts her whole body into every emotion, she's temperamentally drawn to very broad effects. When she tells someone off, she thrusts her jaw out, her eyes flash murderously, and she bites off the profanities as if snapping celery sticks with her teeth. When she goes slack, she really goes slack--the jaw crumbles, the eyes fill with tears, and mascara runs down her face in thick black stripes. A lot of the time Midler looks awful, partly because she doesn't have the training to protect herself against the camera and partly because she doesn't want to protect herself. Instead, she wants to make you feel her pain--at the risk of leaving you appalled.

“I usually resent an actor or actress who grabs me by the collar, but I was still amazed by Midler's power. Like earlier singers who became actresses (Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli), Midler seems to have none of the inhibitions that trained actresses usually have. There's a startling sequence in which she revs herself up in front of a mirror before a concert: Beating her fists rhythmically against her body, she gasps with every blow, until, at the climax, her eyes, which have been tightly shut, suddenly pop open in terror, like the eyes of someone in a demonic-possession movie. But of course this is a domonic-possession movie. Midler's Rose may be too drunk to walk, but when she comes out onstage and the crowd roars, she goes into a full-bodied vamp, shoulders twitching, breasts swatting the air--the transformation is exciting even after you've seen it three or four times. Midler's singing, however, is a bit of a letdown. Forcing her voice, lurching around the stage, sigging whiskey from bottles, she roughens her camp cabaret style as much as she can. Considered by itself, her singing is very good--it's only in comparison with Janis Joplin's death-defying wail that it seems tame, smoothly professional, soul-by-rote.

“Midler's acting keeps slamming across one of the screenwriters' points about Rose--that she feels everything more intensely than other people, and her lack of measure makes her both a great performer and an awful human being. The filmmakers never quite decide if she's more a victim or a victimizer, but they make her helpless before her contradictory impulses (she is vile to people, then immediately repents) and uncontrollably whorish, needing to attract men everywhere as an emblem of her power and then driving them away when they want to claim some part of her life. The harsh combativeness of these scenes gets awfully wearisome ….

“Frederic Forrest … is a revelation …. The wily, super-relaxed Forrest … steals scenes just by tossing off happy comments out of the corners of his mouth; he makes being straight in the middle of a crazy situation appear very glamorous indeed ….

“Having created Rose as a self-flagellating whirlwind, the filmmakers seems mesmerized by her--they forget to create much else. There's almost not feeling for the sixties atmosphere … Nor do we ever find out how Rose/Janis became so inexorably locked into disaster. She isn't, in any significant way, understood; she is simply presented, in all her misery and glory, as a baffling and infinitely moving human possibility.”

David Denby
New York, November 19, 1979