Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since Cabaret. It leaves viewers feeling juiced-up, smart, alive - clamoring for a new era of big-screen musicals with sass and sensibility.
Director-choreographer Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon embrace the effrontery of the lowdown-classic story. Once again, a Roaring '20s chorine named Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) and a headliner named Velma Kelley (Catherine Zeta-Jones) use their notoriety as killers to fuel show-biz celebrity.
The big difference is, this Chicago is a flesh-and-blood musical, whereas Bob Fosse conceived his 1975 adaptation of Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1926 play as "a musical vaudeville." (Ann Reinking choreographed the milestone Broadway revival "in the style of Bob Fosse.") In Fosse's vision, a master of ceremonies introduces every song and dance as a frank stage tour de force. The characters become stylized twice over - once as tabloid archetypes and again as tawdry torch singers or tap dancers. I never saw the Fosse original or its stage revivals, but the excitement of the original-cast album derives from a pluperfect brashness that might have been too much on-screen, especially if the filmmakers had duplicated Fosse's twizzler dance moves.
Marshall and Condon turn Roxie and friends into human figures with just enough human shading to hold the intimate focus of the camera. In their boldest stroke, Marshall and Condon present the tale from Roxie's point of view. Her eye watching Velma's routine is the first thing you recognize on-screen; then Velma gets arrested for murdering her husband and the other half of her sister act. Soon afterward, Roxie kills her lover for leading her on with dreams of show-biz glory.
Even before she lands in the same clink as Velma, Roxie pictures herself as a star like Velma, wailing her opportunistic heart out for audiences that lap up stylized sex and sin. As Roxie's husband, Amos (John C. Reilly), prepares to take the rap for Roxie's perforation of the corpse, Roxie pays tribute to her "funny honey" in a sweet diva manner - until a detective convinces Amos that Roxie and the victim were bedmates.
When the cops jail Roxie, they unleash the movie's wild conception. The prison and, later, the courtroom serve as launch pads for Roxie's fantasies of stardom. Marshall and Condon fully achieve what Herbert Ross and Dennis Potter managed only intermittently in the audacious Pennies from Heaven. In Chicago, Marshall and Condon revive a past era of song and dance - the flapper age. But they also bring home what its style and mood meant to women who dreamed of being flapper queens and men who mused about squiring them around Chicago hot spots. The result for the movie's audience is an aesthetic power surge that lights up every compartment of a viewer's brain.
One key to American pop culture is that when it comes to mass dreams, size matters. So does brightness and glamour. Marshall and Condon know that Roxie's makeover from a desperate hick in a frumpy dress to a spotlight-hugger in sequins rouses cheers however wayward her route to fame. Fosse and Fred Ebb's original book, and Ebb's lyrics to John Kander's heated yet modulated score (which goes from red-hot to white-hot, with stops for cooler shades along the way), simultaneously pillory easy cynicism and demonstrate how liberating it can be to feel feisty and wised-up.
Marshall and Condon carry on that spirit. They constantly inter-cut characters in "realistic" garb with Roxie's view of them as glittering sirens or crackerjack novelty dancers. This inspired strategy both honors the energy of popular culture and comments sardonically on its swampy roots. Thanks to Martin Walsh's surgical editing, Marshall and Condon fulfill the musical-comedy makers' peak desire - doing each song and dance all-out while advancing the story by leaps and bounds.
Their strategy also affords the cast amazing leeway to win and work against our sympathies, often at the same time. One great pleasure of Chicago is the showcase it provides for performers like Zellweger, Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah as the prison matron and Richard Gere as the super-slick lawyer Bill Flynn to cut striking, lusty or hilarious poses - and then jazz up those poses with surprising curves and edges. For uninhibited show-biz vets with a common touch, the sort of populist farce at the center of Chicago has always been a blessed release. (Although it's based on Watkins' play, this musical owes more to William Wellman's knockabout 1942 version, Roxie Hart, which gave Ginger Rogers her best solo role.) The addition of music and dancing to wisecracking dares the performers to parody cheap emotions while making them play king-sized.
One early controversy has centered on whether Zellweger has softened Roxie up. I'd say what she does is open Roxie up and let us see the scared, determined outsider zigging and zagging her way to the inside. Zellweger didn't get the praise she deserved for her wrenching portrayal of a washed-up actress in White Oleander; it's hard to think of another star who could pull off that victim and this victimizer back-to-back with such instant credibility and so little fuss. Zellweger imbues Roxie with the tantalizing allure of a Kewpie doll that kills; her new angular look fits her concept as Roxie and offers a keen contrast to Zeta-Jones' slutty voluptuousness as Velma.
Zeta-Jones, always a gutsy performer (she radiated star-power as the female swashbuckler in The Mask of Zorro), shows a real gift for Expressionist abandonment and even gutter pathos without tears. Queen Latifah has a magnificent earthy irony as a matron who sells help to her best-connected inmates. Although he's game and sleazily affable, Gere suffers by comparison as every female killer's favorite lawyer, a maestro of publicity and chicanery. (You imagine the extra charge Christopher Walken might have brought to the role.) Reilly is a revelation as Roxie Hart's husband. In "Cellophane Man," Amos Hart acknowledges his own invisibility, and Reilly delivers a note of genuine heartbreak through the glitz.
Marshall's square-cut clown choreography is superb in that number - but then again, there's not a weak number in the bunch. His version of "The Cell-Block Tango," in which every lady on Death Row proclaims her innocence or justification for murder (the refrain is "He had it coming"), keeps topping itself in vampish athleticism. The showstoppers in this movie don't stop the show - they keep it firing up. Marshall's embellishments of Fosse's conceptions have their own pop perfection. His presentation of "We Both Reached for the Gun" (Billy and Roxie telling "her" side of the story) as a terpsichorean puppet show has a jolting, wit-flecked precision. Fans of the original Fosse production may object to some of the cutting (including a crowd-pleasing drag gag), but it rids the movie of that sense of surfeit that can taint even the balmiest musicals. You leave Chicago sated - and elated.
Chicago
Starring Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah and Richard Gere
Directed by Rob Marshall
Rated PG-13
Released by Miramax
Time 113 minutes
Sun Score ****