Chicago
To begin by stating the obvious:
What makes Chicago special and undeniably memorable is the fact that
it is a wildly dark musical social commentary transferred to the
screen as a wildly dark musical social commentary. Richard Gere has
played affective and convincing lawyers before and no one blinked,
but put him in some tap dancing shoes and give him a snazzy little
singing number or two and he’ll walk away with a Best Actor Golden
Globe for playing, once again, a lawyer. In many of our minds the
opposite would seem to make more sense. Appearing in a musical would
translate more naturally into appearing in a “disaster waiting to
happen”. The days of the Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and Fiddler
on the Roof have past. Even Disney doesn’t include the traditional
musical numbers in the middle of the action of their animated
features. Our modernized, serious-minded mentalities tell us it is
inappropriate and just downright silly to start singing in
mid-conversation and to not only be accepted for this anti-social
behavior but to somehow engage all those around into accompaniment.
“Preposterous” we say. Ah, but that was before the Moulin
Rouge opened its dazzling doors. Baz Luhrman taught us last year
that music, when taken seriously and delivered stylishly and in the
right environment, can emote and penetrate and stun so much more
powerfully than mere toneless dialogue. He taught us how to sing
again. So in the post-Moulin era, we have a wait and see attitude,
because all of a sudden, the musical motion picture has unlimited
potential.
Chicago is filled with crackling
musical numbers (wisely, most rendered as if on a stage) that prompt
along the story of an aspiring singer , Roxie Hall (Renee Zellweger),
who is convicted of murder, and swings us along through her
incarceration and career making trial.
The singing and dancing is filmed
in such a way that it appears many times as if director Rob Marshall
(virtually a rookie and therefore a phenom) took his cameras into
Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical version and let the cameras roll. So
much so that the audience in my theater cheered and hollered after
each show stopper. Perhaps they believed that the astonishingly good
Catherine Zeta Jones, playing Roxie’s one time idol and now fellow
jailbird, was present to appreciate the applause. Perhaps it was
simply that they were so inspired by the performances that they
needed a physical outlet to exhaust their overwhelming thrill. Some
moments in Chicago (anything with the aforementioned Ms. Jones for
example) are so enthralling that this is a viable possibility. It is
a movie you want to, maybe need to, cheer for and I believe the
reason is that we can’t but recognize the unprecedented effort and
courage it must have taken to put this spectacle together.
Until these musicals began
daringly reappearing, how could we have known the depths of talent
lying dormant in “typically good” actors like Ewan McGregor or
Renée Zellweger? It is truly an unpredictable pleasure watching
stiff actors like Gere and Jones work their butts off to entertain
us in that old school Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers way.
Musicals make actors work for once – really work and we reap what
they sowed.
The actual music in Chicago,
without the visually masterful renditions, is not of itself as
moving or brilliant as, say, the soundtrack from Les Miserable or
Rent. Most songs are quite similarly constructed. They begin in slow
jazzy whispers sounding like a lonely saxophonist in an alley - and
then the voice carrying the song strengthens and begins to repeat a
chorus, and the music builds, the cymbals crash, the chorus erupts
and kicks high, and emotion (predominantly anger or sadness) tears
the house down. So by the end we feel exhilarated, as if we have
been carried along in a wave of gin and cigar smoke.
T
he
songs were written as if the ingredients (sex, booze, lust, greed,
ego and – I can’t resist – all that jazz) were mixed in a
bubbling cauldron and allowed to cool and take shape freely under
the spotlight of a bustling Chicago theater. We get a series of
frantic, panicked, kinetic songs that, while electric like a thousand
volts, become standardized and are with few exception (the opening
number for one)forgettable.
What gives Chicago its great worth
is the visual manifestation of these songs. The anger of the dancers
(“He had it coming!!”) combined with revelatory staging (I
imagine, again, that Marshall borrowed copiously form the stage
version) makes the music stand out more prominently than it would have
otherwise.
Ironically enough, the musical
quality aspect of the film accurately reflects the social commentary
aspect. We learn through Roxie’s fable that talent doesn’t
matter on the road to fame and success. What you need is timing, energy,
creative thinking, PUBLICITY, or any other form of intangible good
fortune coinciding with plentiful and positive publicity.
Essentially, what one would call today, hype.
The look and feel and sound of Chicago is pure,
unadulterated, glittering, glistening hype. It is bright, flashy,
energetic, and the timing couldn’t be better after Moulin Rouge
warmed us up for the super-stylized musical. Chicago, with a cast of
gamers, delivers on the hype and has seized its unique moment with
all the bravado and sizzle of a budding starlet given her one shot
at the big time.
Send comments to bangitout.com movie editor, Jordan Hiller: jtrick1@aol.com
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