MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Chicago’ is sultry, sexy and sophisticated — Grade A
It’s a tale of murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery — all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts.
So begins the Kander and Ebb musical “Chicago,” set in the Jazz Age, where every murder is the next big thing to rock the city. And let’s face it, this is the kind of dirty story all of us love to hear. And with Rob Marshall (a choreographer by trade) at the helm, we are left with one of the most dazzling, true-to-life stage musicals ever made into a movie.
“Chicago” centers on Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger), a housewife who wants to be a lounge singer. After shooting her lawyer, she is sent to prison where she meets vaudeville star Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who killed both her husband and her sister. The two both vie for press attention while lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere) tries to get them off the hook.
Perhaps one of the strongest decisions made in the film was the way the musical numbers were handled. Except for the opening and closing numbers, the others are all staged inside the theater in Roxie’s head. It was very reminiscent of Fosse’s treatment of the film “Cabaret,” with all of the action outside of the Kit Kat Klub and all of the numbers sung on the stage in the club.
One of the other wonderful changes was in the script. Usually, movie musicals tend to sacrifice the story to make the songs fit, or else they change the story to the point that it is almost unrecognizable. In “Chicago,” some of the songs had to be sacrificed to set them in Roxie’s mind, but the story material added to pad those spaces was true to the stage story and provided detailed background information to scenes such as Roxie’s trial that you don’t get in the stage version.
The casting was also, for the most part, a wonderful combination of talented actors destined to play the roles. Zellweger brought the shy sexiness that embodies the unhappy, attention-hungry Roxie.
Zeta-Jones was underused in a role that was demoted to being a supporting bit, but she easily dominated every scene she was in. Queen Latifah as the prison matron, Mama Morton, was also a wonderful surprise. Even Lucy Liu in her bit part as go-to-hell Kitty was wonderful.
The one minor disappointment was Gere. He was wonderful as the killer dillers‚ greasy lawyer, but every time he opened his mouth to sing I wanted to cringe. His nasally voice grated down my spine like fingernails on a chalkboard. In the end, we are left with a movie that could well herald a new era of movie musicals. If they are all as magical and well-done as “Chicago,” then I say curtain up, light the lights, we got nothing to hit but the heights.
Jared Sterzer is a senior majoring in business information systems. Comments can be sent to jwsterz@cc.usu.edu.