By Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
A scene from the movie, 'Chicago'. - Contributed
CHICAGO IS a musical tour de force that will amaze even as it entertains you. Even if you don't dig the genre of musicals, this glossy, stripped-down version of the real thing a 1975 Broadway hit by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse will knock your socks off with its delicious jazz numbers.
Sultry jazz singer Norah Jones won five Grammys on Sunday, jazz is back baby!
The movie captures the look of the late 1920s with sharp suits, sexy showgirls, smoke-filled speakeasies and the peculiar nasal accents of that time.
The movie travels at mach two, and from the opening sequence, you are thrust headlong, pell-mell into the story with a heady breathlessness that sweeps you up before you have settled into your seat and tried to make a pass at the girl beside you. The editing of the movie is precise and the cuts between narrative and the inevitable singing almost seamless.
Chicago begins with bored housewife Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) watching Velma Kelly's (Catherine Zeta-Jones) speakeasy act, Overture: All That Jazz and dreaming of becoming a starlet herself. Both women commit murder that night. Kelly murders her dance partner/sister and her husband after she catches them practising a dance move the #17 spread-eagle in the sack together.
While Roxie plugs her cad of a lover, who it turns out was 'banging her' under false pretences, then convinces her overly trusting, but kindly doofus of a husband, Amos (John C. Reilly), to take the rap. He plays along until he realises the dead man wasn't a burglar as Roxy claimed, but the furniture salesman who had sold him furniture.
Later, the murderous dames, Roxy and Velma, will compete for the attention of Chicago's superstar defence attorney, Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), who works the cases most likely to get him on the front page.
Before I go on, I have a confession to make. I never liked `. O.K., stop gagging, get over it!
This is the 21st century. Which 20-something-year-old do you know is going to buy characters suddenly bursting into song in the middle of a movie? What the director and the screenwriter do here is disguise the songs as actual vaudevillean stage routines or fantasy sequences. It works.
You will love Cell Block Tango where the incarcerated women explain why they knocked off the men in their lives. Each story has a punchline, and the audience especially the women will love it as the femme fatales always repeat the bloody refrain 'he had it coming'.
RAZZLE DAZZLE
I loved Razzle Dazzle - a lawyer's take on how easy it is to manipulate fame, media and the courts in a loud, flashy three-ring circus only a true carnival pitchman could appreciate. I also liked the press conference number with Richard Gere's ventriloquist act an exquisite satire of stage management in the news. Who's pulling whose strings?
Reilly is a genius at taking dopey characters and making them memorable, and his big number, Mr. Cellophane, a one-man soft shoe lament about being a see-through husband, is almost movie magic. Almost. Maybe because at times it comes off with a slight a ho-hum quality.
Richard Gere plays Billy Flynn, a sleazy, razzle-dazzle lawyer, supposedly representing both women, but ultimately his own interests, with vicious aplomb. His ability to manipulate the press and stymie the truth for his own financial gain is breathtaking, but when Gere is required to ham it up a little, he falls off a bit.
Zellweger takes her gifted-girl-next-door comedic act to the stage, and does a fairly decent job. However, she looks a bit emaciated. She must have starved herself for the role, and as my grandmother would say, 'Yu can ketch water inna her collarbone'. Other than that, her Roxie's got a lot of moxie.
Zellweger has a vulnerable quality which is quite appealing, but as Roxie, she exhibits a tough savvy, and quickly learns the ropes. There's a great moment when another murderess (played by Lucy Liu) is threatening to steal the spotlight, when she stumbles and falls, and digs deep to come up with the lines, 'I just hope I didn't hurt the baby'.
Queen Latifah shows off her assets in her Mama number, and does a good job playing the prison matron 'Mama' who stays sweet as long as you got the dough for her to do favours for you. For all its sapphic references, there is no lesbian action in this movie. The guys might find this disappointing.
Catherine Zeta-Jones is dynamite as Velma Kelly, a killer cabaret star, who fumes while Roxie steals her headlines. I was wondering why Zeta-Jones was getting all the good press when she's a supporting act until I saw the movie, and was floored by her raw and dangerous sexuality. The girl is a knock-out. I give her three S's: sassy, sexy, slinky.
If the movie is marketed as a 'Bad Girls' movie in the vein of Tonya Harding or the Lorena Bobbit the lady who slashed off the guy's Mr. Happy it may do well in Jamaica.
Ultimately, it is a cynical, scathing commentary on the United States' media's low threshold for obsessing over 'phony celebrities' caught up in the latest 'Trial of the Century' drama. In one climatic courtroom scene, Flynn makes a telling slip, calling the jury the audience.
One wonders if maybe that slip was the closest thing to the truth, or maybe life is a stage after all.
