There are two things that really define Bob Fosse as a filmmaker to me. The first is his sense of montage whose rhythms and rhymes are as effective as they are complex. The second is Fosse’s unique brand of sleaze. All of his movies are aggressively masculine, they objectify women in their images and stories. Fosse’s style is an artful sleaze. He brought this to bear on Star 80 (1983), his last film, to create one of the most lurid true crime films Hollywood has ever produced.
Typical of Fosse, the autobiographical associations steer his construction of the film. Star 80 was sold as a film about Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway) but it’s really about her abusive husband Paul Snider (Eric Roberts). Star 80 is an effective exposé of the systematic commodification of women in the entertainment industry, yes, yet Fosse never really condemns that system. Sometimes the act of showing in a film is enough of a condemnation but Fosse never once challenges the role of women in Star 80 as victims. Fosse assumes that all women are victims of one sort or another.
There are also a number of visual allusions to Lenny (1974) and All That Jazz (1979) that seem to locate Paul Snider as another in a long line of Fosse surrogates. This time out Fosse isn’t critical of his surrogate or by extension himself. It seems at some points that Paul Snider is to be perceived as a pitiful character. That choice on Fosse’s part only makes Eric Roberts’ performance as Snider all the more compelling and disturbing.
