Chicago 2?

Over on Big Hollywood, mystery man Stage Right is looking at the trailer for the new film version of the Broadway show Nine. Can't say I'm quite as enthusiastic. Looks a bit like an expensive perfume ad to me. Still, nice lingere.

It's being brought to us by director-choreographer Rob Marshall who also did the oscar-winning film version of Chicago.

Here's a review I wrote when that film first came out. We've had a few more Hollywood musicals since then - Hairspray, Mamma Mia, Sweeney Todd - but I think that my main points still hold up: the stars should be musical stars, not just stars who do musicals and the films themselves should be conceived as musical films, not just souped-up stage shows with a lot of machine-gun edits.

Anway, here's the review:

Chicago is the brilliant new film that single-handedly brings back the movie musical to our silver screens. Oops, that was the Moulin Rouge review. Or was it Evita? Ho hum, never mind. Musicals on the big screen are still a rare enough thing to elicit a lot of wishful thinking. But Chicago, like the other recent attempts, still hasn’t managed to re-discover the magic touch of the Golden Age.

One of the big differences between now and then, of course, is the stars. Then, there were musical stars; now, we have stars who do musicals. Take Renee Zellweger, for example: brilliant, brilliant comedy actress (Jerry Maguire, Bridget Jones Diary). But, as you listen to her warbling through the Chicago song list, all you think is: “Oh, she can sing too”. The last Kander and Ebb show that was put to celluloid was Cabaret with Liza Minnelli. But I’ll bet nobody ever saw Liza and thought: “Oh, she can sing too”.

If Zellweger was the newcomer, then Catherine Zeta Jones was supposed to be the old West End trooper. In the interviews we were told how hard she worked, grinding her way through gruelling days, nights, weeks, months of preparation. But that’s just the problem: it still looks like hard work. Her dancing lacks that easy, flowing grace that marks a great performance and she gets found out in the best routine in the film, the Cell Block Tango, where the chorus of murderesses steal the scene from under her nose. To make matters worse, with those long legs and jet black bobby-cut, she bears a striking resemblance to Cyd Charisse in Singing in the Rain. And it only reminds you of what you’re missing.

Its not that the leading ladies are bad, its just that they’re not great and all this has a disastrous knock-on effect. The film crosscuts so relentlessly between the dance sequences and the story you begin to suspect that the performances are deliberately being hidden under a blizzard of machine-gun edits. At one point, when the showbiz lawyer, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), presents his case for the defence in Roxie’s trial, the “fantasy” Billy Flynn starts a little shoe-shuffling tap routine on a stage somewhere. The camera cuts frantically between the two scenes – the court and the stage – as the taps get quicker and the lawyer dramatically winds up the
case. But all the momentum is built up by the editing, rather than the dancing. Gere may be the best tapper in the world, the Gene Kelly of Gigolos, but how could you tell? The camera never stays on him long enough for us to find out. Fred Astaire used to rehearse his routines for weeks, then stroll on to the film set and nail it in one long, continuous take. Imagine the director deciding to break up his dance into a few, snatched cuts here and there. With Astaire you don’t need any fancy editing, all the drama’s in the way he moves.

All this heavy-handed editing comes across as an attempt not to appear too stagey. But that’s missing the point: it’s the routines themselves that need to be more filmic, routines you could only do on film, like dancing on a ceiling or singing in a downpour.

One of the unique things about the show Chicago is that there aren’t really any likeable characters in it: a slick lawyer, a corrupt gaoler, a wussy loser of a husband and a bunch of sensation-seeking murderesses. Who are you supposed to root for amongst that lot? Maybe that explains the reason for all those TV celebs currently traipsing through the London cast. We already like these people from their television roles so they don’t need to earn our applause as characters. But, on film, it’s a different story. The only way we can like these people is if they entertain us, if they really razzle dazzle. Then, and only then, will we like them enough to make them stars.

Chicago, like Moulin Rouge, has bagged itself a clutch of awards but hasn’t really shattered any box office records and I doubt it will open the flood gates for reviving the genre. The movie musical won’t really get going again unless there are great singers and dancers who can fill our screens with all the joy and brilliance of a Liza, Cyd, Gene or Fred. Meanwhile, the biggest stars of film musicals over the last couple of decades have all come from animated films. So forget Chicago; go and rent South Park – the Movie.