Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that this Disney production features a tough, New York street-level milieu, in which confrontations frequently threaten to culminate in fist-fighting, and often do. There are menacing scenes of adults threatening to beat children using clubs and chains, and a rivalry between different subsets of kids looks somewhat like street gangs. One boy smokes cigarettes. There is a strong pro-union (and anti-management) sentiment throughout.
Families can talk about the history of labor movements and strikes, plus the larger-than-life characters of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and a certain U.S. president who makes a cameo at the end. There really was a newsboys' strike, and you could fact-check the parts about it this movie gets wrong. Newsies also proposes, loud and clear, that despite its supposed watchdog role, the media is just as corporate as any other business -- and just as nasty and unethical when its interests are threatened. Of course, unions can misbehave as well, for the same reasons, but you don't see that here. How do we look at the media and at unions today?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
NEWSIES was an expensive disappointment for Disney when it premiered in theaters. People compared it (somewhat unfairly) to the Magic Kingdom's phenomenal winning streak of musical cartoons such as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. It even had the same composers. But critics didn't care for the jarring brew of gritty 1890s New York City and immigrant-labor strife with newsboys-gone-wild song and dance. Newsies, with its energetic score and large-scale dance gymnastics, hits a note lost between the pop-fantasy and ragtime of Bugsy Malone and the R-rated realism of Gangs of New York.
Moreover, conventional wisdom held that live-action musicals in general were extinct. Nobody foresaw anything like High School Musical hitting it big. Young audiences who adore that series might be more in tune with the Newsies beat than were viewers of the 1990s.
Dramatically there is some surprisingly strong stuff here, and perhaps Newsies would have come across better without the tunes. The script is loosely based on actual incidents, and it casts the New York City daily-newspaper tycoon Joseph Pulitzer in a most villainous light. As portrayed by Robert Duvall, the eminent publisher is like Scrooge McDuck, but without the charm. Engaged in a circulation war with rival William Randolph Hearst, the greedy Pulitzer decides to victimize a whole class that can't fight back: the armies of adolescent boy vendors who distribute his paper. He raises the wholesale rates at which the "newsies" buy the "papes" every morning.
In imitation of a bitter trolley strike among the adults, the street-savvy kids decide to form a union of all newsboys in the city, to defy not just Pulitzer but also Hearst and anyone who pushes them around. Leading the strike is Jack (Christian Bale), who lives in an orphanage and keeps saying his parents are out West and will send for him when they're ready, and David (David Moscow), one of the few "newsies" depicted with an intact family -- one in which children have to work because his father suffered an injury on the job.
Pulitzer refuses to negotiate. He fights back viciously, with hired muscle, "scabs," and, finally, using unsavory secrets in Jack's background to both blackmail and bribe him. David and his household also become targets, in between the singing.
Even with an upbeat finale, most grownups come across as the worst kind of abusive authority-figures, domineering and brute-force guardians, although a few, like a nice-guy reporter and a saloon-songstress (legendary Ann-Margaret) support the boys. There is pretty strong Goliath-vs.-David sense of injustice and helplessness throughout much of Newsies, with police and hired thugs against the kids. "We was beat when we was born," says Jack, in jail, and kid viewers may take away a message -- not unlike that in Michael Moore documentaries -- that ruthless, immoral corporations control everything, and that the mainstream media (which named its greatest prize for merit after Pulitzer) is not to be trusted. Especially when its own investments are threatened.
None of the songs went on to become big hits, though the anthem-like "So the World May Know" is kind of catchy. Another gritty musical with even better songs is Oliver!. For a lighter look at a kid gang working together, try The Goonies.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentA scandal headline about a nude corpse, and that's about it. |
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ViolenceMuch fist-fighting and beat-downs, some incorporated into dance choreography (think West Side Story), some not (as in a bare-knuckle boxing match). Often grown men threaten to beat kids. Kids attack back with slingshots. |
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Language"Damn" and "dumbasses" uttered. |
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Social BehaviorWhile Jack deceives his friends (and himself, to a point) about his past, and is coerced into quitting the strike, he eventually does the right thing, especially when his friend David is threatened. While it's never made clear in the dialogue, there's a sense of the melting-pot of New York, with Irish, Jewish, and African American kids overcoming their gang-like divisions to unite in the strike. Adults are mostly meanies, although a few high-placed ones come to the rescue in the end. There are only a few girls in the story, but they stand with the good guys. |
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CommercialismReferences to newspapers of yesteryear, most of which don't exist now. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoRaffish boys smoke (and steal their cigarettes and cigars), and a little child drinks beer to win a bet. |
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