FilmBlather.com

"...and all that jazz."

It is stunning how often and how consistently the hotly anticipated film adaptation of Chicago misses the point of the long-running Broadway musical that is its source. I wondered at times if these people had even seen the show, or if they were just working from the script and sheet music. It's one thing for a filmmaker to put his own spin on a renowned classic, but quite another for him to rob it of almost everything that made it a classic in the first place. Who let this happen? Does no one care?

The play is remarkable for its essential plotlessness, with the little that is present being a buttress for a string of spectacular, sometimes surrealistic Vaudeville-style musical numbers. Marshall and his screenwriter Bill Condon reasonably choose to strengthen the storyline somewhat, fleshing out the characters and their motivations to make us more willing to stick with them. Its biggest move was probably stretching the role of Roxie Hart, played here by an oddly cast Renee Zellweger, and truncating that of Velma Kelly, a game Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Roxie is a sort of Lucy Ricardo in 1920s Chicago, an aspiring Vaudeville performer who cheats on her inoffensive sad-sack husband (John C. Reilly) in the hopes that the boyfriend can get her an "in" with his many professed connections. When it turns out the connections are bogus, she kills him and goes to prison, which is the current home of Velma, the criminal media sensation of the moment. She hires hotshot lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) to both set her free and make her famous, but Velma is far from ready to give up the spotlight.

I know that some within the critical establishment are vehemently opposed to any comparisons to source material, but it is both asinine and impossible to review this movie without constant reference to the play. Doing so would be like reviewing Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho and not mention Hitchcock's original. Idiocy.

To make what is perhaps a less appropriate comparison, Marshall is even less successful than Van Sant. The wonderful songs are for the most part intact, with only a few excisions and truncations, and they are still guaranteed to get stuck in your head, but this vision of Chicago is off, with many small mistakes adding up to one big fat failure. I suppose they'll hardly matter to someone who's never seen the show, but those people should be heading to the Shubert Theatre rather than their multiplex.

One of the reasons that Chicago is one of the few stage musicals I've "gotten into" is that it has a wicked, bawdy, sharp sense of humor, which Marshall mercilessly strips away. Consider "Cell Block Tango," the play's undisputed showstopper and a very funny number in which several women spectacularly recount the reasons for their incarceration; I remember nearly falling out of my seat laughing at its sheer strangeness, irreverence, and audacity. The film's version is aesthetically almost identical, but it is dispiritingly straight-forward; all of the lines are delivered with a cold precision, without idiosyncrasy, without character. Even the "No... not chewin'. POPPIN'!" line is robbed of its verve.

Maybe the movie would have worked better if the filmmakers had had the courage to make an actual musical. The play never deliberately blurred the line between its universe and "reality," with the songs placed on the same playing field as the action. This Chicago takes the easy way out, dismissing all logistical challenges by simply flipping to an imaginary world whenever the time came for a production number. It's cheap, and cheesy, and stupid, and unimaginative and, to steal a phrase from the venerable Mike D'Angelo, I wish a temporarily crippling case of influenza on whoever is responsible.

There are redeeming facets. I loved Richard Gere, and his songs, most notably "Razzle Dazzle" and "They Both Reached for the Gun", are the highlights of this show. Other great numbers are ruined by blunderheaded casting and choreography choices: "When You're Good to Mama" worked on stage -- at least in the productions I saw -- because Mama was a small, elderly, white lady, and Queen Latifah is neither small nor white. The actor doing "Mr. Cellophane" isn't supposed to be given funky dance moves; he's Mr. Cellophane, people.

The film was, I'm sure, made with the best intentions. No one sets out to desecrate a masterpiece, or so I hope. I still want to see a film version, just one with a director who isn't chickenshit, casting that isn't thoughtless and a script that at least tries to retain the spirit of its inspiration. I hear they had originally cast Kathy Bates as Mama. Now that's Chicago.