Best Picture: # 75
Original Release Date: December 27, 2002
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Director: Rob Marshall
Quick Impressions:
As we picked up coffee after school the other day, my daughter and I came up with what we first thought was a hysterical joke. What if someone made a Chicago prequel starring Lady Gaga? She could play Veronica Kelly in the days leading up to her murder. Meanwhile reprising the role of Velma Kelly, Catherine Zeta-Jones could be thinking back over her sinful past and recounting the whole tortured story to a priest (played by F. Murray Abraham, basically just because we love Amadeus). When necessary, Zeta-Jones could step back into her memories and play Velma in the past, too. (You wouldn’t need another actress, digital effects, or special make-up because she’s basically reliving her own memories!) And what would this brilliant musical be called?
ChiGaga!
We were giggling so hard when we pitched it to my husband (with jazz hands and everything). (And then he ruined the moment by not remembering who Veronica Kelly was!) In the days since, however, we’ve started taking our nonsense more seriously. Okay, leave F. Murray Abraham out of it (if he’s not interested) and probably don’t call it ChiGaga (though that’s awfully fun to say with jazz hands), but why shouldn’t there be a musical prequel to Chicago starring Lady Gaga and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Kelly sisters? I think there should be. Maybe one day, my daughter will make films herself. If she’s still as obsessed with Lady Gaga then as she is right now, who knows what might happen!
In the meantime, I suppose I’ll write about the movie that does exist, the Best Picture winner of 2002 and first musical to win the prize since my beloved Oliver! (unless you count Amadeus as a musical). In case you can’t already tell, my daughter liked Chicago. I had hoped that she would because A Beautiful Mind failed to impress her (although she agrees with me that equations look more fun when you write them on the window panes). To be fair to Russell Crowe and Ron Howard, my daughter has discovered that most films made this millennium excite her way less than older movies do. In fact, once we finish our Best Picture project, we may switch to silent films for a while. But for now, though she would prefer to watch a movie made in the 1920s, my daughter was content to watch a story set in the 1920s.
I’ve always liked Chicago. If you follow the Oscars, it’s a refreshing change of pace. Despite its intense cynicism, the film is still pretty fun to watch, and most films trying to win Best Picture are so dark. (This one leads us through some dark moral places, yes, but we get such colorful, dazzling eye candy on the way that we’re delighted to be dragged down to Hell for a couple of hours. I mean, yeah, we’re vaguely appalled by the pervasive vibe of moral bankruptcy, but still, we’re having fun.) I’ve never had the opportunity to see the show on the stage, so I have no useful comparisons to make there, but I did enjoy the movie, both in 2002 and now. Back then, I was conveniently obsessed with Catherine Zeta-Jones just when the movie came out (lucky timing), and she’s riveting as Velma Kelly. I’ll admit that I’ve never seen anyone else play the role. I’m aware that Bebe Neuwirth did play Velma. And I used to listen to the Original Cast Recording with Chita Rivera (who has a cameo in this film) all the time when I was younger. So I can’t make any useful comparisons to others’ interpretations of the character, but I like Zeta-Jones. Her openness about her Bipolar II diagnosis makes her a sympathetic figure as far as I’m concerned, but quite apart from that, she’s a talented singer and dancer (which I will never be). (I’m always thrilled when others are.)
The Good:
I can’t remember why I used to like Catherine Zeta-Jones so much before this movie. This is a far better part for her than she has in the movies I remember watching her in back in the late 90s. (I guess I got interested in her when she was in The Mask of Zorro? That’s the kind of movie my parents could easily be persuaded to go to, and for a while, my hobby when home from college was luring them to movies.)
At any rate, when Chicago first came out, I was at the height of a brief, intense obsession with Zeta-Jones, so the timing of the film’s release could not have been better for me. (And I was thrilled when she won Best Supporting Actress.)
What I had kind of forgotten until this watch was how good Renée Zellweger is as Roxie. In fact, perhaps I never properly appreciated her performance. I remember the Oscars in 2003. Written for the movie, the song “I Move On” was nominated, but Zellweger wouldn’t perform it live. She said she was too nervous, I think. Zeta-Jones did perform, even though she was over eight months pregnant. (Originally, I joked “eighty months pregnant,” but reading over the sentence, I decided, “No, you know what? The truth makes the point well enough. Eight months is very pregnant.”) I will confess that (besides making me even more impressed with Zeta-Jones) this development left me with the impression that Zellweger could not actually sing. (People were whispering about that, and I believed it—because otherwise why wouldn’t she perform?) Instead, Zeta-Jones performed the song with fellow Best Supporting Actress nominee Queen Latifah (who, of course, can sing). The two of them put on a better-than-average Oscars performance.
Then when I saw Judy a couple of years ago, I felt bad. I thought, “Well, I owe you an apology, Renée Zellweger! Obviously, you can sing, after all, and I shouldn’t have listened to all of that gossip about you.”
(I suppose it’s not a crime to speculate that someone can’t sing well enough to perform at the Oscars. I certainly can’t! I love to sing, and when my younger son was a baby, I hardly ever stopped singing. I would try to sing him to sleep, but he treated it more like a concert, forcing me to run through entire Broadway shows at a time until I was completely hoarse and out of breath. But if they asked me to sing at the Oscars, I would be forced to reply, “Listen you’ve got to get Queen Latifah!”) (There’s singing, and then there’s singing.) (And don’t get me started on being nervous!)
In the film itself, Zellweger’s singing sounds fine to me. (I remember some people being highly critical back in 2002, but my ear is not trained enough to hear whatever problems they were noticing.) I don’t notice conspicuous problems with her dancing, either, though admittedly, I know even less about dancing than I do about singing.
In “Roxie” her choreography and movement in general reminds me a lot of Marilyn Monroe performing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Let’s Make Love and just basically everything she did in Gentleman Prefer Blondes. (The last number she performs with Zeta-Jones reminds me so much of the way Monroe and Jane Russell danced together.) I’m pretty sure the choreographer working with Monroe on both of those films was Jack Cole who usually had her move around in ways that…don’t appear to require great skill or athleticism yet still look nice and jazzy. (You can see I don’t have a technical dance vocabulary.) I’m not sure if Zellweger is supposed to remind me of Marilyn Monroe, or if the choreography just happens to be similar.) (Or if it merely appears similar to me because my childhood obsession with Marilyn Monroe is bleeding over into my adult life coloring all my perceptions.) (Don’t look to me for expertise! You would have to get Queen Latifah to dance for me, too! I remember spending weeks struggling to learn one tiny bit of choreography when I was in Godspell in high school. Another girl had to miss a performance, so someone filled in for her and mastered the same dance steps in like ten minutes.) In brutal honesty, I’m lucky if I can walk down the street without falling on my face, so I’m the wrong person to evaluate anyone’s dancing skills, but I think Zellweger dances reasonably well (though not much is demanded of her). (It’s not like watching Gene Kelly.)
Given the film’s relentless pacing and the energy of the songs, I’m surprised Chicago doesn’t feature more dancing. (Possibly stage versions do. I haven’t seen them!) Every musical number in Chicago seems so kinetic, alive with motion, and yet the performers also seem fixed in a fairly small space. With the notable exception of Zeta-Jones, the women in “The Cell Block Tango,” and that one part where Richard Gere tap dances, there’s way less actual dancing than the drama of the music would suggest (which is odd because we’re given the impression of constant motion and energy). But in the moments where she is asked to dance, Zellweger looks just fine to me.
And she makes Roxie more sympathetic than she has any right to be with her (baffling) vulnerability and her superb comic timing. (My daughter laughed out loud when she announced she was born on a beautiful Southern convent).
Back in 2002, I was very invested in the Best Actress race between Zellweger and Nicole Kidman, and I think that perhaps I didn’t appreciate how good the former is as Roxie. But the role is difficult (largely for reasons I’ll discuss later on), and on this viewing, I began to see more and more merit in Zellweger’s performance (even though I still like Zeta-Jones best).
The supporting cast — Queen Latifah, Richard Gere, Christine Baranski, Taye Diggs—they’re all good. (I remember Dominic West’s part being bigger, but that’s probably because I had a weird obsession with him, too, because I loved him in that Ian McKellan version of Richard III.) (I don’t think his part is too big in that, either, but I also had an obsession with the entire Tudor dynasty, and you just don’t get to see Henry VII on screen that often.)
Watching the first time, I was skeptical about Richard Gere as Billy Flynn, but then I liked him in the role. (My grandma and I had opposite reactions to his performance. A huge fan of The Cotton Club, she couldn’t wait to see Gere in Chicago, but the entire film bitterly disappointed her. She kind of hated the movie (but not as much as I hated Unfaithful which we watched together around the same time. She loved that one. As I reflect back, she and I had a long history of disagreeing about Richard Gere performances. I think he’s good in Pretty Woman. She thought Pretty Woman was completely revolting on every level.))
My favorite supporting performance (if you don’t count Zeta-Jones who clearly stars in her “supporting” role) is John C. Riley as Amos. Riley has come up in a number of conversations I’ve had lately (because of his resemblance to recent Jeopardy! champion Jonathan Fisher), so I was just remarking on the fact that he had sizeable roles in three of the five Best Picture nominees of 2002, Chicago, The Hours, and Gangs of New York. I actually liked him best in The Hours because his well-intentioned obliviousness made me so uncomfortable. He’s very good in this, too, though, because lets us see the humor and the pathos in Amos all at once.
When I watched the first time, I was so obsessed with Catherine Zeta-Jones that I’m not sure I had any useful thoughts about the film at all. But on this viewing, I was terribly bothered by the show’s glib cynicism. Roxie Hart is just so despicable. Granted, everyone else is, too. (Actually, Velma is really not.)
But Roxie particularly upsets me. She’s just far more sympathetic than she ought to be (and I give Zellweger a lot of the credit for that). I understand that she wants to be a star. That’s fine. And it’s hard not to admire her persistence. But the idea that she becomes a star by murdering someone upsets me. Her essential relentlessness is commendable in its own way, but committing murder is taking things a bit far if you ask me.
Velma is different. She discovers her husband cheating on her with her sister and kills them both in a moment of passion. That just makes her seem human (with a bad temper) (and perhaps a sense of entitlement). I mean, yes, she clearly murdered them deliberately and obviously does remember doing it. But her rage indicates that she did care about both her sister and her husband.
Roxie, on the other hand, comes across as a bit of a sociopath, and yet you spend the whole movie rooting for her. At least, I’ve never watched it yet thinking, “I hope she hangs!” (She deserves to, though.) She’s charming but so utterly morally bankrupt. Plus, the way she treats her husband is so despicable. That’s the worst part. If I treated my husband like that, I would hang myself! (I feel like I treat him badly enough as it is. Never intentionally, of course, but I’m just a lot of trouble.) Amos reminds me of my husband in terms of general goodness (though my husband is not so…gullible, I guess).
So I watched the movie this time preoccupied with two related questions: 1) Why does Roxie remain broadly sympathetic when she behaves like such a sociopath? 2) Why do Roxie’s character flaws bother me so much when the idea that Chicago (and perhaps by extension the world) is entirely corrupt does not bother me?
Billy Flynn, the crooked lawyer who knowingly gets murderers acquitted if they pay him $5000 and there’s good press in it for him? He doesn’t bother me at all. He should. But he doesn’t. The fact that the press makes celebrities of murderers? Whatever, that’s fine. The fact that the prison matron is corrupt and taking bribes? Sounds right. The fact that the one innocent woman in the prison is the only one who hangs (quite possibly because she’s an immigrant)? Yes, that’s very consistent with the reality I’ve always known. This is all nothing to me. I’ll just stay out of Chicago. (It’s very easy to avoid. I’ve only been there once in my entire life.)
I’m being kind of facetious, obviously. The whole world is corrupt, not just Chicago.
But Roxie bothers me. I think it’s because her viciousness is unnecessary. So often, she choses to hurt people. When she’s weak, she thinks up schemes, and as soon as she’s in a position of power, she hurts people. Why? That’s very creepy, and I don’t know why I get such a sense of pleasure from watching a story about her that ends in her triumph. (I’m discussing this here because I think a strength of Chicago is that its story provides such food for thought, although the film’s driving pace does not give a fresh audience much time for contemplation.)
Maybe one reason that Chicago is such a pleasurable watch is that it is kind of low stakes emotionally. We have the feeling Roxie will survive (because she’ll do anything), but if it turns out that she’s punished, we won’t feel that bad because she deserves it.
But it did occur to me this time that in the past I’ve watched the film incorrectly. I’ve always seen Velma and Roxie as sort of the same. But they’re not. We have absolutely no reason to believe that Velma is a sociopath and every reason to suspect that Roxie is. At the beginning of the movie, Roxie is watching Velma, hoping to be like her. It’s hard not to think, “Well, you never will be because you have no soul.”
Velma’s a different kind of murderer. I wish I knew more about her. (Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a prequel about her adventures featuring Lady Gaga as her sister Veronica?) It’s possible that Velma is more vicious than she appears, but we don’t know for sure. I don’t think there’s anything else to know about Roxie.
Best Scene:
The opening scene is certainly eye-catching. Our first New Year’s Eve as a couple, my husband and I watched Chicago together on DVD. Our older son (about to turn three) was awake through “All That Jazz” and found it absolutely riveting.
Best Song:
All the songs are quite catchy. My daughter’s favorite is “The Cell Block Tango.” I have always loved “I Can’t Do it Alone” because there’s something irresistibly captivating about the idea of performing a sister act as one person. (I’m the type who always tries to sing both parts of a duet.) It amazes me that Roxie is not persuaded in the slightest bit by Velma’s plea because I would find an offer like this impossible to resist. (How can you reject someone out of hand when she’s sliding down an entire table toward you?) (I realize she’s not actually doing that, that the dance sequences are imagined, but still, the energy of her plea is just irresistible to me.)
On this watch, the song was even better because I said to my daughter, “She’s very talented. I just don’t think I could ignore her if she were doing that. I’d be like, ‘Well…you’re a narcissistic murderer who treated me like dirt, but…’”
And then my daughter said, “She looks like you!”
Stunned, I replied, “Me?!???”
“Yeah,” she said, “when she does,” and then she mimicked the incredibly enthusiastic face Velma was making.
Delighted, I exclaimed, “I’m going to remember that. I’m going to tell everybody you said I look like Catherine Zeta-Jones. I won’t say when or why.”
Later on, I was thrilled to discover (to my immense surprise), “She DOES have facial expressions like mine! I can’t sing, dance, kill, or fit into that outfit, but I’m always very enthused.”
To be clear, I look absolutely nothing like Catherine Zeta-Jones, but we really, truly do make the same kinds of enthusiastic faces and crazy eyes. This discovery brought me great joy.
Best Scene Visually:
Personally, I like the marionette aspect of “We Both Reached for the Gun.” (Visually, the circus theming of “Razzle Dazzle” always makes me laugh, too, especially as Amos gets confused during his testimony.) During Richard Gere’s musical numbers, we always seem to be looking at everything going on around him.
Not funny at all but equally arresting visually is the hanging sequence late in the film.
Best Action Sequence:
How can you beat the rundown of multiple murders that we get in “The Cell Block Tango”?
Best Song by Renée Zellweger:
The one I like best is “Funny Honey,” just because of the unexpectedly enraged turn it takes. (I feel like I should mention at least one of her songs because I keep calling out everyone else’s.)
The Negatives:
I just remembered (at this instant) that I used to dislike the version of “The Cell Block Tango” on this film’s soundtrack because I preferred the way it was performed on the Original Cast recording from 1975. Watching it in the movie was fine, but when I was driving or running around my house listening to my Walkman, I found the older version of the song infinitely superior. (I forgot why. Sorry!)
I have a number of small, irrational complaints. The most urgent is that I think the film should include more songs. It’s not even two hours long! Nobody would mind a few more songs, surely! I’m still not sure why the Queen Latifah/Catherine Zeta-Jones duet “Class” was cut from the movie. (Where did I see it? On the DVD extras, I think.) Both of them sing so well, and Latifah only gets to sing one song. I think that song should have been left in. Also I personally think Christine Baranski should be in the movie more (but that’s mostly just because I like her). (I know Mary Sunshine is supposed to be a man, but she’s not, so there’s not much she can do about that.) In general, I would have liked a few more songs. (I know there are more! They’re on that original cast recording from 1975 I used to listen to all the time! Why not just include them?)
The only other thing about Chicago is that I know it’s based on a true story. Usually, when I like a movie based on a true story, I want to learn more about the story. But I think I’ve heard quite enough of Roxie’s story, and I’m also not that interested in the inspiration for Velma (though I would love to hear more about the fictional Velma).
Truthfully, though, now that I’ve seen the movie Nine, I find it difficult to say anything too terribly critical of Chicago. (It’s not that Nine is horrible. In fact, all I can remember about it, really, is Judi Dench singing a number I never expected about the Folies Bergère.) I just remember that when I was watching Nine, I thought, “How in the world did the same director who made Chicago take a cast like this and get this result?” As I recall, my husband and I liked Nine better than most people. But I did not like it nearly as much as Chicago. And I remember pointedly thinking while I watched, “Yes, Chicago wasn’t a perfect film, but overall, it was so strong.” And overall, it is.
Overall:
Chicago is so strong. It’s not a perfect film. But it will never be a waste of time to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma Kelly. She gives an outstanding performance. The entire cast is good. (Renée Zellweger, in particular, is better than I noticed at the time because I was so focused on Zeta-Jones.) The music is great, and the whole thing is much more cheerful to watch than Million Dollar Baby (which for us is up next since we’re skipping Return of the King and coming back to it later for complicated reasons I’ll explain in a future review).