December 27, 2002 | It’s sassy, jazzy and razzmatazzy. And, mind you, I’m referring only to the opening production number. Just about everything that follows in Chicago is every bit as sensationally entertaining. To put it simply and gratefully, this is the sleekest and sexiest movie musical to slither, shake and scintillate on screen since Cabaret.
Granted, I can’t compare this Chicago to the original 1975 Broadway production, directed and co-written by the late, great Bob Fosse, or even to the show’s more successful, still-running 1996 revival. (I did catch a performance by a third-rate touring company during the late 1970s, but fled the scene of the crime at intermission.) Even so, I strongly suspect that any comparisons would be largely irrelevant, given how director Rob Marshall (a first-time feature filmmaker with ample stage experience) and scriptwriter Bill Condon have more or less reconstituted the stage production’s basic elements.
On stage, Marshall explains in the movie’s production notes, Chicago was a traditional Broadway musical in which characters suddenly burst into song during plot-advancing activity. (In this case, a plot cribbed from a 1926 play previously filmed in 1947 as Roxie Hart with Ginger Rogers.) For the movie version, however, he and Condon have transformed the production numbers into fantasies of would-be singer-dancer Roxie Hart, the central character who “sees her life in these musical sequences,” Marshall says. This way, the movie exists simultaneously on two planes: The harsh reality of Depression-era Chicago, and the “surreality” of Roxie’s imagination.
The result is in many ways as deft and dazzling as Bob Fosse’s similarly stylized film of Cabaret. Better still, Marshall – who also co-directed (with Sam Mendes) the recent, Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Cabaret – manages to infuse his own film with the same sort of darkly and sharply cynical humor. Chicago is a movie about nasty people doing nasty things – to themselves, each other, and various not-so-innocent bystanders — and they’re all the more engaging and exciting for their utterly amoral approach to igniting and sustaining their superstardom.
Roxie, played with equal measures of naïve aspiration and ruthless cunning by Renee Zellweger, fatally shoots her oily lover when he proves unwilling (and, worse, unable) to help her fulfill her showbiz ambitions. Despite her best efforts to pin the rap on her dumb but loving lug of a husband (John C. Reilly) – with, it should be noted, the poor schnook’s initial acquiescence – Roxie winds up in prison, just a few cells down from the lovely and talented Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who’s facing a murder conviction for her own crime of passion.
Both women are represented by Billy Flynn (a twinkly eyed Richard Gere), a smooth-talking, sharp-dressing and fact-twisting attorney who knows that the best defense is a media blitz. When he isn’t literally tap-dancing around the truth in a Chicago courtroom – this is a musical, remember? — Flynn is busily image-spinning, transforming cold-blooded murderesses into heart-tugging victims, and heart-tugging victims into headline-grabbing heroines.
In one of the movie’s many inspired musical fantasies, Flynn is at once a savvy ventriloquist, speaking for Roxie, and a master puppeteer, manipulating reporters like sob-sister Mary Sunshine (Christine Baranski), while turning the tide of public opinion against those who would prosecute his poor, put-upon client.
“It’s all a circus, kid,” Flynn tells Roxie. “A three-ring circus. These trials – the whole world – all show business.” The attorneys for O.J. Simpson, Winona Ryder and assorted other celebrity defendants would doubtless agree. Which, of course, is yet another reason why Chicago is so much spiky fun.
Ultimately, Flynn is so successful at transforming notoriety into celebrity, guilt into innocence, that his two clients inevitably gravitate toward their natural habitat – i.e., a spotlighted stage. Unfortunately, Chicago lacks a sufficiently show-stopping number to celebrate this climactic metamorphosis. But don’t worry: Even though the finale leaves you vaguely unsatisfied, just about every other knockout number in the John Kander-Fred Ebb score offers abundant sizzle and spark.
Indeed, it’s difficult to single out one sequence as best of show, or first among equals. There’s the saucy tango number in a stylized cellblock, performed by a dozen or so accused murderesses (all of whom insist that their victims “had it coming”). There’s the curtain-raising and temperature-rising “All That Jazz,” Zeta-Jones’ first opportunity to demonstrate her heretofore untapped talents for sultry song and dance. There’s Queen Latifah’s serenely self-confident naughtiness as the sashaying prison matron who promises, “When you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you.”
And then there’s Reilly, poignantly expressing his character’s near-anonymity, aptly describing himself as “Mr. Cellophane.” And Zellweger, all done up as a breathy Marilyn Monroe lookalike. And then…. And then…. And so on.
Zellweger, Zeta-Jones and Gere may seem like odd choices for above-the-title roles in a big, brassy movie musical. But trust me: They’re so terrific, they’ll likely be offering repeat performances in other musicals. And, yes, I do believe there will be other musicals – lots of them, actually – because Chicago succeeds so brilliantly at blasting the cobwebs off a dormant genre, and proving last year’s wildly uneven but often exhilarating Moulin Rouge wasn’t a one-time-only fluke. The shows must go on. And Chicago shows us why.
