The Bette Midler concert film Divine Madness is not the most extreme of its one-woman-show contemporaries; it’s neither as outrageous as Sandra Bernhard’s Without You I’m Nothing nor as esoteric as Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave.  It does predate both of those examples by years, though, and it’s an excellent time capsule of Midler in her artistic prime.  By the time I was a child, Midler was a kind face in mainstream comedies and a soft-rock radio mainstay, but before my time she was a much more risqué, confrontational performer who rose to unlikely fame by playing gay bathhouses.  I’ve only caught glimpses of her blue material by purchasing live-concert albums at thrift stores, in which her song tracks are buffered by her telling raunchy sex jokes in a vaudevillian Sophie Tucker voice.  It turns out Midler’s stage act was a little more involved than that, but not very.  Mid-film, she acknowledges to her live audience that Divine Madness is intended to be a complete omnibus of her early-career bits, which include firing off raunchy punchlines while playing with a rubber chicken, maneuvering her arm flabs in an act of auto-puppetry, and concluding the show in a handstand as if it’s all she has left to give.  It’s like witnessing the exact moment someone who grew up putting on backyard shows to half-bored parents as a little girl truly made it as the most popular drag act in the world (complete with glittery mermaid costume & tear-away bra).  Midler sings, dances, quips, and costume-changes her way through 95 relentless minutes of maniacally horny schtick while a raucous audience eats directly out of her hand.  I was immediately frustrated that I could not climb through the screen to join them, even though I had not yet fully seen what she was capable of.

There isn’t too much visual style or craft to Divine Madness that’s worth picking apart.  It’s shot in an extreme widescreen frame that suggests a scale of cinematic ambition that director Michael Ritchie never attempts to back up.  After a brief sketch comedy intro in which the theater staff pray for a clean, morally uplifting show in a pre-curtain pep talk, the movie quickly settles into plainly documenting the concert from a few rigidly stationary camera angles.  Whatever energy is missing behind the camera is overflowing from the stage, though, with Midler hardly taking a breath between telling fart jokes then launching into a Janis Joplin-style barnburner rock number.  Her personalized rearrangements of contemporary rock & pop standards are demonically manic, most notably in a rendition of “Leader of the Pack” that translates girl-group vocals into sweaty punk yipping.  It’s a genuinely psychotic act that could only have developed in the glory days of cocaine chic & pre-AIDS sexual abandon.  I don’t know that individual songs or jokes matter all that much to the overall quality of Midler’s show; it’s likely the punchline about discovering her backup dancers “selling their papayas on 42nd Street” killed in 1970s NYC bathhouses in a way that it never could outside those venues.  Her unrelenting chatterbox energy steamrolls any momentary doubt about the show’s quality, though, pummeling the audience with purposefully hacky bit after hacky bit after bit until you’re laughing at punchlines simply because they have the cadence of something you know is funny.  It is classic vaudeville in that way, just updated for an audience whose brain has been rattled by rock & roll, disco, and hardcore pornography.  You don’t have to do much with the camera to make that entertaining; it’s the kind of classic entertainment that predates movie cameras.

If Divine Madness has any connection to current cinema, it’s through Midler’s daughter Sophie von Haselberg.  Von Haselberg recently starred in Amanda Kramer’s psychotronic meltdown Give Me Pity!, which warps the one-woman-show format into a funhouse mirror reflection of the manic narcissism shared by all performing-arts types.  In retrospect, watching Give Me Pity! before Divine Madness was a little like seeing Warhol’s pop art screen-prints of Marilyn Monroe before ever seeing a true Marilyn Monroe picture (which I’m almost certain was another born-late experience of mine as well).  Even Give Me Pity! was artificially backdated to an early-80s aesthetic, though, which is another indication of this work being frozen in time.  I suppose all concert films are technically documentaries, but Divine Madness is especially true to that aspect of the medium.  Just a few years after the 1979 concert it documents, Midler’s public persona had transformed to the point where the movie was already a relic of a bygone era; by the time she recorded “Wind Beneath My Wings” for the Beaches soundtrack, she was unrecognizable.  If you’ve ever been curious what made Midler an exceptional screen & stage presence before she softened up & mellowed out, Divine Madness is essential viewing.  That goes doubly if you’ve ever wanted to know what it would sound like if The Shangri-Las could trigger a psychotic break.

-Brandon Ledet