Chicago

#58 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

It’s nice to see Bob Fosse win his second Best Director Oscar. Oh, wait, I’m being informed that Fosse died nearly thirty years before the production of the film version of Chicago. Well, props to Rob Marshall for aping Fosse’s approach to filming dancing numbers like in Cabaret by, pretty much, just taking Fosse’s choreography from the original stage musical and filming it? Whatever, it’s fine. I doubt Fosse would have cut the dancing up quite this much, though. Anyway, the film is a fun entertainment, a light romp through murder and jazz and speakeasies in Depression era Chicago that is filled with toe-tapping music, winning performances, and theatrical production design. I couldn’t begin to tell you why it won Best Picture, though.

The story of Roxy Hart (Renee Zellweger) murdering her lover (Dominic West) and then using the era’s affinity for jazz murderesses to get herself off is largely a thin clothesline to hang a series of musical numbers (music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb), and the film lives and dies by them. It’s a good thing they’re all toe-tapping fun. From the opening number “All That Jazz” that introduces the other main murderess, Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta Jones), right after she kills her sister and cheating husband, and it skips right along, showing us Roxy killing her beau, and getting into the song “Funny Honey” about Amons (John C. Reilly), Roxy’s dupe of a husband, and then into “When Your Good to Mama”, introducing Mama (Queen Latifah), the head of the prison ward that Roxy finds herself in after being arrested, and right into “Cell Block Tango” that introduces the variety of reasons the other women are in the prison. There’s hardly any talking in between the numbers in this opening, and it seems designed to get the audience into the right mood as quickly as possible.

That mood is toe-tapping and amoral to enjoy the company of murderesses, the lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) who wants to get them all out of prison if they have $5,000, and then, off to the side, is Amos.

I think the film is actually in between tones a bit. Most of it is this toe-tapping good time, not really considering the morality of anything and just barreling forward from one fun number to the next, but then we have Amos, the only good person in the whole thing, who seems so out of place that he ends up kind of dragging the film down. I’ve never seen the stage musical, but I wonder if that is better balanced on the stage because Reilly plays Amos as a complete and total loser, a good man who was cuckolded by his wife and will stand by her through it all. It’s not a major problem I have with the film, but I do find it odd.

And the actual story is this whiplashy race through the newspapers’ opinion pages and court mechanics as Billy tries to keep Roxy on the front page and sympathetic no matter what while Roxy competes with Velma and even other new murderesses for attention and sympathy. All of it is buoyed by those musical numbers like “Razzle Dazzle” or “I Can’t Do it Alone” or even “A Tap Dance” which propel the film forward through all of its plot mechanics.

And, honestly, it’s not that much to talk about. There’s not a whole lot to talk about other than it provides a thin look at how the public is celebrity obsessed, though it’s a secondary concern at best, while Amos gets shafted in every which way off to the side. The appeal is the music and the dancing, and it’s fun. I do think Marshall overcut the film, denying us enough clear looks at the extravagant dance numbers, but it works well enough as it is. I also find it annoying that the film feels the need to try and “explain” the musical numbers by implying that Roxy is imagining them instead of just embracing the whole musical genre.

It’s a fun little film. It made decent money. It won Best Picture over The Pianist.

That’s its legacy, I guess.

Rating: 3/4