'Why Do Fools Fall in Love' (R)
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Better yet, why do fools take a perfectly fascinating story the brief life and career of 1950s doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon and the three women who married him and turn it into a dull and frustrating movie? Ah, the eternal mysteries of life.
The trouble with "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" (which takes its title from the hit song of 1956 by 13-year-old Frankie Lymon and his backup group, the Teenagers) is certainly not the source material. In the brief time from when he hit the charts to his death by heroin overdose at age 25, the precocious Lymon (here played by Larenz Tate) managed to bed and wed a succession of three women petty thief Elizabeth Waters (Viveca A. Fox), pop vocalist Zola Taylor (Halle Berry) and schoolteacher Emira Eagle (Lela Rochon).
Subsequent marriages were unhampered by the fact that the earlier unions may or may not have ever been legally dissolved. In the mid-1980s, the trio of putative ex-wives took his record company and manager to court for years of unpaid royalties from his brief string of hits (including "Goody Goody," "Baby Baby" and "I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent") in a lawsuit that forms the framing device for the movie's flashback narrative.
Now that's good stuff, and the circumstances of this short and tragic life raise a lot of interesting issues, few of which are adequately addressed in Gregory Nava's confusing film. For instance, how was an adolescent with a high-pitched voice able to seduce grown women?
Although Tate plays Lymon with abundant physical energy and has a face that's easy on the eyes, the miscast actor never looks remotely 13, and the girlish voice that is heard coming out of his mouth during obviously lip-synced stage performances is in sharp contrast to Tate's lower speaking voice. In fact, the very issue of Lymon's extreme youth is glossed over entirely by Tina Andrews's superficial script, which, despite on-screen dates, is a chronological jumble that only raises more questions than it answers.
As sparring wives Elizabeth, Zola and Emira, co-stars Fox, Berry and Rochon are sporadically amusing in some of their cat-fight-in-a-courtroom scenes, but the head-bobbing, finger-wagging and trash-talking confrontations are excessive and unilluminating as to the women's motivations.
In fairness to the talented trio, however, their over-the-top performances are quite probably due to the appearance in the film of limelight-hogging rocker Little Richard as himself. Testifying in the 1986 lawsuit as a former friend and music-biz colleague of Lymon, the human dynamo reprises his brash but tired shtick about how he is the "originator, the emancipator, the innovator" of rock 'n' roll. It's no wonder that the three actresses have to over-emote a bit just to seem like they are on the same planet as this scenery-chewing ham.
Another perplexing issue is director Nava and writer Andrews's inability to resolve the tone of their schizophrenic picture, which can't decide whether it wants to be a serious biography of a character who would otherwise have remained a pop-cultural footnote, or a screwball comedy complete with wig-pulling, swimming pool-dunking and the shrieking of anachronistic put-downs. But the real void at the film's center is the foundering Tate, who only impersonates at best and never understands the real Lymon.
As a coda to the film, we are shown a brief, black-and-white clip of the real Frankie Lymon, singing and dancing with the face, voice and body of an angelic munchkin. It's ironic that the filmmakers have chosen to leave us with the very mystery that the movie purports, but fails, to address: Who was that charismatic man-child?
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