Chicago begins oddly (oddly for a movie musical) with a close-up of a woman’s eyes. Hungry eyes. Envious eyes. The camera moves closer and closer as if it would like to plunge into the mind behind them. Is this really a musical we are about to see or some sort of psychodrama? Both, as it turns out, plus a satire on an America so media-brainwashed and celebrity-obsessed that its legal system has become an annex of show business.
Those eyes belong to Roxie Hart, an unemployed third-rate showgirl of the 1920s who will do anything to become a star. Dumb enough to sleep with a furniture salesman just because he claims to have showbiz connections, Roxie is also sharp enough to realize, after she shoots her betrayer dead, that a front-page murder can be more fame-enhancing than a hit Broadway show, and that a murderess can be a superstar, even an acquitted superstar, if her lawyer is good enough and if the press gets on her side. But Roxie has to compete for publicity against Velma Kelly, another showbiz murderess in the cellblock. A Broadway show getting bad reviews may die at the box office. For Roxie and Velma to get bad reviews (that is, unsympathetic headlines) means to die at the end of a rope. This very real peril never snaps Roxie out of her celebrity-obsessed fantasizing. Whatever takes place in her imagination becomes a musical act in the nightclub of her mind, while whatever happens in the everyday worlds of prison and law court gets enacted with snappy dialogue and only slightly stylized staging.
In almost all other musicals a song or dance glistens and validates the idea or emotion introduced by the dialogue. The middle-aged lovers of A Little Night Music putter around in prose for a few minutes, hinting their rue at romantic opportunities bungled. Finally the heroine sings "Send in the Clowns" and the awkward hints are replaced by bittersweet, lyrical certainty. Prose swells up into song and song validates prose. But that’s not the way Chicago operates.
In this movie the songs exist only to be punctured by the cynicism of the dialogue. Thus, Roxie believes that the superstar lawyer, Billy Flynn, will take her case as an act of chivalry, so she imagines him singing "All I Care about Is Love" as he glides to the rescue of every falsely accused damsel in sight. Intercut with this number is the reality of Flynn turning down all clients who can’t meet his fee. The original Broadway Chicago of the 1970s (music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb) was acidic enough, but all its cynical deflations had to wait their turn. When Jerry Orbach (the stage Flynn) sang "All I Care about Is Love," he could pump it full of smarminess, but the full revelation of the lawyer’s greed only emerged once the song was over. After all, Orbach couldn’t split himself into two actors performing side by side. On screen, though, director-choreographer Rob Marshall and his editors can create two Billy Flynns, one to sweep through Roxie’s daydream and one to puncture it. By cutting back and forth between gallant singing Billy and greedy speaking Billy, the director serves up both idealization and deflation simultaneously.
Some of the musical numbers reflect the fantasies of characters other than Roxie. A press conference with client, lawyer, and reporters all turned into marionettes represents Billy’s ideal of the perfect legal strategy. In "Mister Cellophane," Roxie’s husband wallows in self-pity. In perhaps the movie’s highlight, "Cell Block Tango," Roxie’s cellmates, all slayers of no-good lovers or husbands, arise from their cots at night to become low-rent furies, dancing with the ghosts of the murdered men in a clever reversal of the Parisian apache: this time, it’s the male dancers who get smacked around and strangled. The choreography captures the brutal sexiness that epitomized Bob Fosse’s dances for the original Broadway production, and Marshall’s editing and use of sound give each spin, torsion, and thrust a savage burnish. The result is a perfect instance of theater empowered by filmmaking instead of the usual canned theater.
Was it because Chicago’s dialogue scenes carry so much satirical weight or because the Kander-Ebb score is anything but soaring that the director decided to cast actors who could sing rather than musical comedy pros who could act? To be sure, Queen Latifah, a rapper who has evolved into a red-hot mama à la Sophie Tucker, more than holds her own in both departments as a prison guard on the take, but the other roles give more trouble to the performers filling them. Yet Marshall manages to capitalize on these troubles.
John C. Reilly keeps Roxie’s malleable husband lovably simple rather than repellantly stupid, and his thin warbling of his only song, "Mister Cellophane," seems integral to his characterization. The shyster Flynn, a role that cries out for Christopher Walken, is sketched a little too complacently by Richard Gere, employing his usual smirking cockiness. He works hard at his singing and dancing but, trying to emulate the style of a 1920s crooner, he ends up sounding weirdly like Don Adams of the Get Smart TV series. For his climactic number, "Razzle Dazzle," in which Flynn literally and figuratively tap-dances his way to legal victory, Gere’s limitations are covered by Marshall’s razzle-dazzle. The splintered, MTV-style editing does the real tapping.
As Velma, Catherine Zeta-Jones (who’s done some musical comedy work on the London stage) comes across as an actress approaching the peak of her talent as an actress and just past her peak as a dancer. (It should be noted, she was pregnant during filming.) Her movements are strong and confident but, especially in her crouches and turns, somewhat laborious. This proves perfect for the role of a second-class diva whose viciousness fuels her insecurity.
In the past, Renée Zellweger has often played innocents who get righteously wised up. Here, as Roxie, she darkens her colors just enough to convey timorous envy edging into sheer nastiness. In the musical numbers, Marshall and his crew have served her up as a Marilyn Monroe icon.
Chicago is an insolently successful movie and, since by the time you read this it has probably won the Academy Award, it is behaving more insolently than ever in your local multiplex. I enjoyed it immensely and my only major reservation is not about its artistry but about the ethos behind its artistry.
I once attended a play put on by a semiprofessional rep company. Each of the actors’ bios in the program concluded with "He (or she) is now currently engaged in clawing his way to the top." It was a joke and yet it was just a tad serious, too. Show business is such a crowded, desperate field that every one in it, no matter how decent, has to hustle, if not claw, elbow, and backbite. This breeds an ethos of self-contempt blended with rueful self-forgiveness. All about Eve presents the fang and claw of theater with acid wit but also with wry affection. In his magnificent phantasmagoric play, The Tooth of Crime, Sam Shepard portrays rock ’n’ roll stars as gangsters, glamorous in their violence. (Rap made Shepard’s fantasy literal.) Showbiz has never hidden its lethal aspects from the public, but there is always an undertone of "Total bastard, that one, but...what a trouper!"
That’s the dominant tone of Chicago in its concluding scenes. The entire show is satire, all right, and prescient satire at that, considering that it was written three decades ago, long before O. J. and Robert Blake. Yet the exhilaration that Rob Marshall and his company pack into the dancing and singing isn’t confined to sheer technique; it rubs off on his characters and the way we are encouraged to respond to them. Velma, Billy, and Roxie exhilarate us with their brazenness and their ability to wriggle away with murder. A society and a system are indicted but the malefactors who eventually thrive within that society and system are to be exculpated, not just by the jury but by us. Nobody walks out of a good production of Othello chuckling, "That Iago, what a little scalawag." But Velma and Roxie? Knock ’em dead, girls! [end]
