The Screen Sings

The show was originally a Broadway musical, conceived by Bob Fosse, about murder and show business. The first thing director Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon did right in their movie version was to drain it of Fosse’s flip nihilism. On Broadway, we were asked to laugh along with the “six merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail,” who jokingly describe their crimes in a number called “The Cell Block Tango.” On screen, the same number is genuinely macabre–frightening and powerful.

Unlike Fosse, who wanted to make a Point About The Evils of Celebrity, Marshall and Condon bring the story down to human scale. The movie “Chicago” touches on all the same themes, at times even more savagely than Fosse’s show. But the irony doesn’t overwhelm the tale. Marshall and Condon never let us forget that “Chicago” is ultimately the story of a killer desperate to save herself from the hangman’s noose.

In 1920s Chicago, Roxie Hart (played by Renée Zellweger) shoots a man after he tricks her into bed by promising to get her on the stage. The district attorney wants the death penalty, and a terrified Roxie gets her cuckolded auto-mechanic husband to pay $5,000 to a flimflam lawyer named Billy Flynn (Richard Gere).

Flynn’s other client is a vaudeville headliner named Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who killed her husband and sister after she found them together. Roxie meets Velma, whom she worships, in jail. Velma has no use for Roxie. But the tables turn when Roxie’s fame behind bars begins to eclipse Velma’s. Condon and Marshall bring Roxie, Velma, and Billy together in a climactic courtroom scene that features a plot twist worthy of that other great movie set in Chicago, “The Sting.”

The confidence and command that pop out at you from every frame are all the more astonishing because “Chicago” is the first feature film directed by Rob Marshall. Marshall is best known as a Broadway choreographer. He did a fine job refilming the musical “Annie” for television four years ago, but nothing in his career gave a hint of the supernatural talent he displays here as a visual stylist and cinematic storyteller.

Most of the song-and-dance numbers take place inside Roxie’s vaudeville-obsessed fantasy life, into which she escapes from the dreary and terrifying precincts of the Cook County Jail. This structure could have become confusing, or cutesy, or annoyingly mannered (as it has been in similar films, such as “Pennies from Heaven”). But Marshall pulls it off effortlessly, in large measure because the wonderful songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb have a stylized quality that makes them seem almost dreamlike.

MARSHALL TOOK GREAT RISKS in casting, and those have paid off as well. Richard Gere looks like he stepped out of a rotogravure newspaper supplement and sings his part in a scratchy tenor that makes it sound as though he were being recorded on a 78-RPM platter. It’s far and away his best work since “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982. The gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones has exuded sexuality but little else in her other screen roles. Here she practically bursts through the screen at you in a ferocious performance that displays her pretzel-like abilities as a dancer.

Gere and Zeta-Jones at least had musical stage experience (Gere on Broadway in the 1970s, Zeta-Jones in London in the 1980s). Renée Zellweger has never sung or danced professionally, but she outshines them both in work that suggests she–who in 2001 transformed herself into a dumpy Londoner for “Bridget Jones’s Diary”–might be able to do just about anything if she puts her mind to it. Her Roxie is pathetic, delusional, cruel, and conniving, yet always fully human.

Despite the dark qualities of its plot and characters, “Chicago” is exhilarating in the way only a movie musical can be. From the time that Al Jolson inaugurated the talkie era by singing in 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” the movie musical was the most reliable moneymaker in Hollywood and the financial backbone of the most successful studio, Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Two musicals–“The Sound of Music” and “Grease”–remain among the ten highest-grossing movies ever made (in constant dollars). The musical was also Hollywood’s pride and joy: Between 1951 and 1968, six musicals (“An American in Paris,” “Gigi,” “West Side Story,” “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Oliver”) won the Oscar for Best Picture.

So why did the movie musical fade away in the 1980s? It’s become conventional wisdom to say that musicals stopped working because audiences became uncomfortable with the spectacle of performers turning toward the camera and bursting into song. But that doesn’t really explain it. After all, audiences over the past twenty years have shown themselves perfectly willing to suspend their disbelief about other, far more ridiculous spectacles–like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone escaping unscathed despite thousands of bullets being fired at him at point-blank range, or cars flying forty feet through the air, landing, and then driving off at top speed. If a car can fly, why can’t a person sing and dance?

Musicals became obsolete in part because Hollywood began using their storytelling techniques to punch up other, more superficially exciting, genres like the action picture and the science-fiction epic. Those flying cars and dueling spaceships are the chorus lines of contemporary Hollywood. According to Joel Silver, who produced the four “Lethal Weapon” movies, a successful action film is made up of “whammoes.” A “whammo,” Silver says, is “an explosion, a car chase, a fight scene that keeps the audience interested.” Silver’s formula for success: “You’ve got to have a whammo every ten minutes.” The whammo is really nothing more than a production number–with the sound of bullets being fired replacing the sound of tap shoes slamming against the floor. And just as a good action picture will have at least ten whammoes, a good musical must have at least ten numbers.

THE EFFECT of these cascading climaxes can be overpowering. Everyone knows the title number of “Singin’ in the Rain,” universally considered the greatest Hollywood musical, in which a love-besotted Gene Kelly splashes around on a soggy Los Angeles street. But only five minutes before that, there’s another heart-stopping number called “Good Mornin’,” during which Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor offer up an amazing display of synchronized tap-dancing. And five minutes before that, there’s “Moses Supposes,” in which Kelly and O’Connor turn a boring elocution lesson into a two-man comic riot. All that in just twenty minutes’ screen time.

“Chicago” doesn’t quite reach those heights–what other movie ever has?–but it does keep coming at you. The first twenty minutes leave you practically gasping for air. The opening number, with Zeta-Jones grabbing hold of the great Kander-Ebb song “All That Jazz,” is followed by Zellweger’s comic “Funny Honey,” then hard along by “The Cell Block Tango.” Then comes Queen Latifah, playing the jail warden, and channeling Sophie Tucker and Ma Rainey in a knockout rendition of “When You’re Good to Mama.” Finally, Gere dresses up as a shoeshine boy and does a triumphant striptease to the tune of “All I Care About (Is Love).”

Rob Marshall and Bill Condon have revitalized the movie musical, for which they should receive every type of award there is. They have certainly earned the thanks of anyone who wants to see a genuinely transporting movie without having to watch a lot of bad acting taking place aboard a spaceship.

John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.