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 Ren