Chicago Review
by Don MacGregor (deeachem AT NO_netscape_DAMSPAM DOT com)June 1st, 2004
CHICAGO (2002)
A Review by Don MacGregor
Synopsis: Set in the Jazz Era Chicago of the 1920s, Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), a struggling chorus girl, dreams of one day becoming an onstage star. However, she soon shoots her lover because he not only leaves her, but also lies to her about helping advance her career. (He had it coming, as the song goes.) Now locked up in the Cook County Jail's murderess row run by a warden called Mama Morton (Queen Latifah), Roxie finally meets her stage idol, Velma Kelly, a performer who killed her own sister and husband after catching them cheating on her together. But Roxie and Velma both soon find that they hate each other. In order to beat the rap in her case, Roxie convinces her loyal but dim-witted husband Amos (John C. Reilly) to raise the money to hire Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), the best lawyer around, to represent her. Flynn takes the case and proceeds to make Roxie into a media celebrity in the local press as he builds her defense. However, the two murderesses quickly learn that getting away with murder is much easier than maintaining the media's interest.
Review: Seeming almost like a musical satire written after the media circus of the O.J. case, it's truly amazing to look at the history of Chicago, which goes back over three-quarters of a century. Originally a stage play written by a Chicago journalist named Maurine Dallas Watkins in 1926 that was a satire of two actual trials she covered (in fact, some plot-points in the play - such as claiming both reached for the gun, as well as being pregnant - came directly from one of these real cases) in which two murderesses used the basic "innocence corrupted by booze and jazz" defense to get off in their murder cases. The play was soon made into a silent movie also called Chicago in 1927 and later into a cleaned-up by the censor-office sound movie called Roxie Hart in 1942, starring Ginger Rogers in the title role. In the 1950s, Bob Fosse saw it as a good project to turn into a musical and tried to buy the rights to the story from Watkins. However, in the intervening years, Watkins had a change of heart about her source newspaper articles possibly helping guilty women escape punishment and refused to sell the rights to her play. So Chicago was all but forgotten for the next two decades until after Watkins' death, when Fosse was finally able to buy the rights to Chicago from Watkins' heirs. Teaming with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, both of whom also wrote the music for Cabaret, which Fosse adapted into film in 1972, they created the vaudeville-styled musical version of Chicago, which premiered on Broadway in 1975. Although a reasonable success at the time, it was soon overshadowed by the blockbuster A Chorus Line, which swept the Tony Awards that year. After its initially Broadway run ended, Chicago was largely forgotten again for another two decades until the time for it was right, with a 1996 revival being such an overwhelming success that it's still going strong today. A film version seemed inevitable at this point, but Bob Fosse's death in 1987 meant that someone else would have to adapt this work for the screen.
In the move to the silver screen, a director was found in choreographer Rob Marshall, who, ironically, had gotten his onstage start in a touring company performing A Chorus Line, the same musical that beat out Chicago for the Tony Awards in 1975. Much the same as Fosse had done with Cabaret, Marshall revised the unconventional storyline of the Chicago stage musical to be more cinematic. In order to fit the songs into a more conventionally structured storyline, Marshall's main revision suggests early on that the musical numbers are all in the imagination of Roxie Hart. It's a take that actually works rather well, even if it's mostly forgotten about halfway through the film. In choreographing the musical numbers, Marshall was stuck with a "damned if ya do, damned if ya don't" situation: if he copied the stage's choreography, he'd be criticized for simply mimicking Fosse's brash and sexy style (even though that's exactly what the stage revival version already did); while, on the other hand, if he redid all of the choreography from scratch, he'd be criticized for not being faithful to the source material. Thankfully, he chose the best option, which was staying true to the original stage choreography, even if it meant being assailed with the inevitable snipping of being weak "faux-Fosse" - Marshall only augmented the choreography with a few cinematic flourishes here and there that wouldn't have been possible on the stage.
Rob Marshall unfortunately also followed Bob Fosse's Cabaret adaptation example of dropping a large number of songs from the stage version. Of the 19 songs in the stage version of Chicago, a whopping 7 songs were dropped for this film version, which is cutting far too deeply in my view. A few I can see dropping, such as the odd, opera-styled "A Little Bit of Good (in Everyone)" song, possibly the weakest song in the musical (as well as the related, but rather strange "Mary Sunshine being a transvestite" subplot). But almost all of other drops made little sense. For example, "I Know a Girl" which segues into "Me and My Baby", one of the catchiest songs in the entire musical, both would have fit perfectly into the movie at the point Roxie first says she's pregnant, so the loss of these two songs is deeply disappointing. And, of all the songs that got cut, the song that almost made it is surprisingly "Class" which would've been one of the first I personally would've seen as easy to cut because it has little to do with the plot and is one of the weaker songs in the original musical. Add to the fact that the song is a comment on the song "When Velma Takes the Stand" in which Velma tells Billy Flynn of her planned courtroom histrionics for building sympathy from the jury and then is shocked when Roxie (as coached by Billy) steals and uses all of her ideas (hence lacking "class" in Velma's distorted definition of the term). Without "When Velma Takes the Stand", the song "Class" loses its ironic meaning and should not have even "almost" made the final cut of the film. However, one new song is added to the movie called "I Move On", which is played over the end credits. It's a new composition by Kander/Ebb and is pretty good, although not quite on the quality level of the other songs. (However, "I Move On" losing the Best Song Oscar to a song by the musically-talent-challenged Eminem, or more accurately Enema, who seems like some sort of white trash / ghetto trash genetic experiment gone horribly wrong, is yet another Academy Awards travesty that more and more cheapens the awards every time it happens.)
The musical scoring for Chicago itself, which stylistically is modelled on 1920s-era jazz but in the slow songs is very reminiscent of Kurt Weill's musicals such as The Threepenny Opera, shows a growing maturity in Kander's composing. Although I'm a big fan of Cabaret and its music, he shows so much growth as a composer here, that the music is very clearly (at least to my ears) superior to his compositions for Cabaret, while Ebb's lyrics are just as strong as his ones in the earlier musical. (How on earth this superb musical score lost the Tony Award to the bland choruses of A Chorus Line is absolutely mindboggling.) Also, some additional incidental music is provided for the film version by Danny Elfman; while I am a fan of Elfman's music and he does a decent job of attempting to mimic Kander's style, his music is not on the same quality level and does stand out to trained ears as being a bit sub-par in comparison (much the same as Süssmayr's musical additions stand out poorly within Mozart's Requiem), begging the question as to why Kander wasn't hired to write the incidental music, or at least have someone arrange some of his already existing music for this purpose.
Another criticism I have with the movie is over editing in some of the music numbers. Although it doesn't reach the gensu knife-like cutting excesses of Moulin Rouge, it's still overdone and Rob Marshall's explanation that it's to maintain an "editing rhythm" established in other musical numbers that cross cut with "real world" scenes quite frankly doesn't hold much water. And one unfortunate side effect of the over editing is some people think it's to cover up the performers on-stage weaknesses, which really is not true at all because this is an excellent and stage-worthy cast in every role.
On the casting, although I'm not a fan of Richard Gere at all, he really won me over in the movie because he does a excellent job playing Billy Flynn and, even though he has a somewhat thin and nasally singing voice, he makes the most of it by giving a "sideshow huckster" take to his songs that works extremely well with the "circus ringmaster" nature of the Flynn character. Renee Zellweger initially seemed all wrong for the role of Roxie, but once she takes on the image makeover of an young, innocent girl led astray, she then looks absolutely perfect for the part (which is one reason why Velma hates her, because she is herself too voluptuous-looking to convincingly pull off such an image change as Roxie has). Also, Zellweger's thin figure actually fits the "flapper look" very well, because a slender, flat-chested figure was actually the preferred look of the 1920s. Although her singing and dancing were arguably the weakest of the cast, I actually think she sings the role better than Ann Reinking from the revival cast recording, whose raspy singing voice doesn't really fit the character, in my opinion. And the really great casting choice is Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly, who shows remarkable stage talent in every scene she's in - comparing musical recordings, I would say she is at least as good as, if not better than, Bebe Neuwirth from the revival cast. Finally, Queen Latifa and John C. Reilly both stand out and are quite memorable in their small roles. This is a cast that is good enough to appear in a stage production of Chicago and for anyone to claim otherwise just shows how little some people know about onstage performers because it's not superhuman dancers out there, just regular actors and actresses. (For proof, recently playing Roxie Hart on Broadway was Melanie Griffith, a good actress but hardly a singing and dancing super-talent.)
On the whole, I think the film version of Chicago is superb, a fantastic adaptation of a truly great musical. Although I think The Pianist is a better movie and deserved the Best Picture Oscar more, Chicago is my next pick for the award out of the other four nominees so I have no complaints about its win. However, the unnecessary cutting of too many songs from the original stage version really forces me to mark its rating down a bit, because as a musical the primary reason for its existence is the music, particular when it sounds this great.
Rating: A-
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