Chicago
Review
by : Eric Barker
| Starring:
Renée Zellweger (Roxie Hart), Catherine Zeta-Jones
(Velma Kelly), Richard Gere (Billy Flynn), John C. Reilly
(Amos Hart), Queen Latifah (Mama Morton)
Written
by: Bill Condon, from the musical Chicago by
Fred Ebb & Bob Fosse
Directed
by: Rob Marshall
|
Insatiable wanna-be chanteuse Roxie Hart kills her
lover when she discovers he has lied to her about a stage
career, then conspires with defense attorney Billy Flynn to
remake herself as a media celebrity.
A smashing,
hyperkinetic film version of the legendary Broadway hit, Chicago
reeks with scalding wit and a healthy cynicism about America’s
cult of personality, recapturing everything that is loveable
and necessary about that woefully lost art form, the Movie
Musical. Awash in metaphors linking show business with everything
that its story touches -- adultery, murder, the corrupted
machinery of the courts, and the often vacuous, always vicious
crucible of public opinion -- Chicago is a toe-tapping
trip to hell. It may take place in the Roaring 20s, but like
all good period pieces, it’s really the past seen through
a prism of Now, a sly wink at the way some things have always
been the same, no matter how much they seem to change. Especially
in SHOW BIZ!
The stage
version of Chicago was created by the late, great
director Bob Fosse, in collaboration with the songwriting
team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who had given Fosse his
biggest film hit, Cabaret (1972). Fosse was an iconoclast
who transformed the art of popular dance in the sixties and
seventies, creating an eroto-comic style, part jazz ballet,
part burlesque, that has since become a standard in pop culture,
particularly in commercials and music videos. As a filmmaker,
he revolutionized the way dance was photographed and edited,
making the backbeat of the music, and the sweat and strain
of his choreography, into nearly palpable sensations for an
audience.
Chicago
was Fosse’s stage masterpiece, though it was not a triumph
when it first appeared. A grimly funny, deliriously sexy romp
built around a play of the 1920s by the same name, it was
a little too dark, even for the decadent seventies. Based
on the real-life media circus surrounding the trial of murderess
Roxie Hart, whose highly publicized escapades delighted the
town where Al Capone was king, Chicago did not achieve
true legendary status until its revival in the 90s, after
Fosse’s untimely death, with a production that stayed
true to his original designs.
Chicago,
the movie, is directed by first-time filmmaker Rob Marshall,
whose previous credits have been as a choreographer for a
handful of children’s television programs (including
the 1999 version of Annie, which he also directed).
Clearly a student of Fosse’s groundbreaking techniques,
Marshall opens the film with an orgy of cross-cutting inspired
by Cabaret, following the deadly-glamorous Velma
Kelly as she shows up late for a night club performance with
blood on her hands, takes the stage and proceeds to (pun intended)
knock ‘em dead with a killer rendition of Kander and
Ebb’s “All That Jazz” amid a writhing, groping
chorus of male and female bodies. The star-struck Roxie Hart
is in the audience, entranced by this spectacle straight out
of Dante, and now the zig-zagging montage follows Roxie home
with her illicit lover, Fred, for a frantic tryst that is
underscored by, and cross-cut with, Velma’s siren song
of selfish lust.
What an
intro! What contrapuntal razzle-dazzle, and it works marvelously.
Within two or three minutes, Roxie is shooting her lover to
death, for being a liar and a scoundrel, and she’s off
to a surreal women’s prison, where Velma Kelly is already
behind bars for the double murder of her sister and boyfriend,
and the high-kicking, remorseless inmates tell their own stories
with the insistent refrain of “He had it coming!”
Well, the road to stardom is a rough one; someone has to be
sacrificed to the media gods.
And the
fun never stops. Chicago is crammed with parallels
comparing show business to the general brutality of life,
and charged with a constant barrage of rhythmic imagery. In
fact, the film hardly ever slows for a breather, Marshall
turning every number into a show-stopper, as if he fears boring
a restless audience. Chicago’s worst flaw is
in letting its own pulsing montage take control of the best
musical numbers, often smothering the choreography with mindlessly
changing perspectives that add little to the song or the dance.
It is a mistake Fosse never made, though he was a consummately
flashy director; in his films, the editing always served the
dance, not the other way around. Perhaps Marshall should watch
Cabaret just one more time, to see how the old maestro handled
the pacing of his shots.
Chicago
is saved from these new director jitters by Marshall’s
superb collaborators. The individual numbers of the Kander-Ebb
song score flow like thematic variations on a single, unified,
honky-tonk sound hellbent on satirizing anything in its path.
Ex-hoofer Ann Reinking, the Fosse protégé who
staged the Broadway revival of Chicago in the mid-nineties,
choreographs the ubiquitous dances, and she not only achieves
the Fosse touch, she flatly quotes his catalogue of moves.
But the
most satisfying surprise of the film, in our Age Without Musicals,
is seeing three talented movie stars, none of whom is particularly
noted as singers or dancers, getting the chance to strut their
stuff in a high quality act. One-time gymnast Renée
Zellweger, a real actress who excels in creating flawed, three-dimensional
characters, is charming as usual in the lead role of Roxie,
but who knew she could belt out a tune the way she does here?
She has to be heard to be believed. And Catherine Zeta-Jones
may not exactly be Ginger Rogers, but her Velma Kelly is a
force of nature, sending a chill up the spine in the opening
number, curdling the blood with her stare of indomitable ambition,
and commanding the screen in every scene she enters. This
is undoubtedly her best performance in a still-new career,
one that may raise her price substantially.
The sweetest
revelation of Chicago, however, has to be Richard
Gere, who literally comes alive as the smooth and unscrupulous
Billy Flynn. Long before American Gigolo (1980) made
him a movie star, Gere was Danny in the original London cast
of Grease, and he still seems so at ease in the world
of musical comedy, it is unthinkable that Chicago
is his first real shot at this very specialized form of film
acting. The trend against movie musicals has robbed us of
seeing him at his best. Although by this point in life, Gere
is a very mellow dancer indeed, he can sell a vaudeville tune
with self-deprecating panache, and that is much more important
than having the moves.
Of course
it is ironic, and no particular surprise, that Chicago
is the best movie musical since Cabaret. We haven’t
had many movies to compare with Cabaret in thirty years: it
was a film that not only took the art form to new heights,
but inadvertently served as its death knell, stripping away
the façade of reality that had hog-tied musicals of
the late sixties, while at the same time seeming to banish
forever the notion that a musical could be about anything
but show business.
This is
really just a matter of semantics, though. It’s all
about show business, all of it -- musicals, romantic comedies,
action-adventures, space operas and tales of forgotten ages
-- and never more than now. All the world’s a stage,
and so on. Perhaps Chicago, which is about show biz
and murder and lust and ambition, will revive an interest
in musicals on film, perhaps not. But here, at last, is the
proof that it can still be done, if a filmmaker has the balls,
vision, and a decent Broadway source to draw upon.
Notes:
Richard
Gere (b. 1949 in Philadelphia) began his career as a musician
and songwriter before turning to acting. He traveled the U.S.
in summer stock for several years, then won the lead role
in Grease. He spent several years on the stage before
his breakthrough film role in Days of Heaven (1978).
Catherine
Zeta-Jones (b. 1969 in Wales) starred in the West End production
of 42nd Street at the age of 15. She became a TV
star in her homeland during the early nineties in the comedy
show Darling Buds of May, before her stateside break
came in The Mask of Zorro (1998).
Cf. the
best of Fosse: Cabaret, naturally; Lenny
(1975), an electrifying biopic of Lenny Bruce, with Dustin
Hoffman in one of his best roles; and All That Jazz
(1979), Fosse’s striking, cinematic autobiography. In
a sense, the three films represent a trilogy examining ever
deeper glimpses into the psychic cost of being in the spotlight.
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