Film Review: CHICAGO ****½ (out of 5)
“They had it coming
They had it coming all along
I didn’t do it
But if I’d done it
How could you tell me that I was wrong?”
– “Cell Block Tango”
Insatiable wanna-be 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 a legendary Broadway hit, Chicago burns with scalding humor 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 corrupt 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 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 job was as a six-time Tony nominee for his choreographing and directing just this kind of show on the Great White Way. 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 “And 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’s 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 dance steps and composition.
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 at 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 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’s 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 increasingly hamstrung 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 yes, even cheaply made indie films, which are their own kind of genre. 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, the vision, and a decent Broadway source to draw upon.
Chicago
directed by Rob Marshall; screenplay by Bill Condon, from musical Chicago by Fred Ebb & Bob Fosse, based on play by Maurine Dallas Watkins;
director of photography, Dion Beebe; edited by Martin Walsh; music by John Kander; lyrics by Fred Ebb
with: Renée Zellweger (Roxie Hart), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Velma Kelly), Richard Gere (Billy Flynn), John C. Reilly (Amos Hart)
1 hr., 53 m.; Miramax, rated PG-13
release date: January 24
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 series Darling Buds of May, before her stateside break came in The Mask of Zorro (1998).
Cf. The best of Bob 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, prophetic autobiography. In a sense, the three films represent a trilogy examining ever deeper glimpses into the psychic cost of making a living in the spotlight.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
