Francis Albert Sinatra was the greatest, the voice of the century, a talented singer, a gifted actor, not a very good father or a husband but he was one in a billion and the legacy he left behind is beyond measure. That's why it's so hard to imagine anyone trying to imitate his persona or impersonate him on screen - there's just no one like him, never was and never will be.
After watching North and South I got really curious about one actor who played a fantastic villain - it was Philip Casnoff and while searching through his filmography I immediately spotted the name Sinatra in it and what do you know - he plays Sinatra, so naturally I just had to go see it with my own eyes.
Sinatra is, as it's now popular to say, a biopic covering the life of Frank Sinatra from the 1920s to 1974 and I watched the whole 4 hours of it in one sitting, without even dozing off. The narrative goes by pretty fast but most of the times I just found it difficult to tie one scene to the next, so tattered it is. One could imagine out of four hours there's got to be development, growth and closure for multiple characters but we only see one - of Frank himself - all the rest just pops up on the screen whenever they're needed and fades away just as fast.
The first two hours showcase Sinatra's younger years and they are the most inspiring and relatively good but Frank's tunes start to get on your nerves after a while - they change each other every two minutes, sometimes even repeating themselves and without a proper music score other than his songs to back up the narrative it's difficult not to feel bored a little. The last two hours on the other hand are trying too hard to pile up as many events as possible which in the end turns up to be a mess of things that don't add up to each other.
Another thing that bugged me the whole time, and I've already mentioned it, is that Frank's shoes cannot be filled by someone else and I just couldn't see Philip, with massive talent that he possesses, in the man mimicking Frank's singing behind the mic. Sinatra's voice is iconic and irreplaceable and you see that in every scene Philip does the singing; only by the end of the movie, when he plays an older Frank I was able to see The Voice in his performance.
Gina Gershon as Frank's first wife Nancy was a gem here but she didn't get enough time to truly make it big for her character; her lines were even cut off mid-sentence to bring out more of Frank's greatest hits. Marcia Gay Harden as Ava Gardner was ok and although she kept saying repetitive lines and her whole storyline got scrapped abruptly as soon as JFK entered the picture (and he vanishes as quick) she did well on her part as Hollywood's notorious heartbreaker. The rest of the cast are merely named fillers with not much background to make their characters worth mentioning.
Overall the movie, like most all of the biopics, lacks cohesion, structured narrative, consistency and reasoning, and even with four hours of screentime it doesnt make a good job in bringing Sinatra on screen and capturing his life the way it's supposed to.
