Review of The Rose

The first thing I had to do when I hit the IMDb board for this picture was to check the Award nominations for Bette Midler. Sally Field was pretty good in "Norma Rae" that year, but man, Midler's performance here was out and out classic. The comparisons to the life and times of Janis Joplin are pretty obvious if you lived through the era, and my preference would have been for an outright telling of the Joplin story as she remains to this day my favorite female vocalist. Even so, Midler evokes the spirit of Joplin in her tortured portrayal, a woman desperately looking for love but never quite finding it or coming to terms with the limitations of a life on the road that legislates against it. Instead she turns to alcohol, drugs and the next fling hoping that somewhere in all the turmoil a miracle blossoms from the maelstrom. Interestingly, no Joplin songs are part of the film, though a number of them parallel the kinds of songs that Bette Midler performed with heart wrenching emotion. The closest was 'Stay With Me, Baby', reminiscent of Joplin ballads like 'Maybe', 'Little Girl Blue', 'Cry Baby' and 'A Woman Left Lonely'. Oddly, this is the only movie in which I've seem Midler perform, as her real life persona has a tendency to rub me the wrong way whenever I've seen her on a late night talk show or in a similar venue. But here she WAS 'The Rose', and she was absolutely stunning.