Soundtracking: Chicago
Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 9:00AM by Chris Feil
With Renée Zellweger likely taking home another Oscar for her performance of Judy Garland this Sunday, it feels like a full circle moment for the actress’s career and Oscar’s relationship with musicals in the modern era. Rob Marshall’s take on the Kander and Ebb masterpiece Chicago was a platonic ideal between Academy voters (and the public) who sneered at the genre and its fans that were reinvigorated by the audacity of Moulin Rouge! just a year prior. Chicago injected new life into a previously dead genre, reigniting Oscar’s love as well, from all-out musicals to especially musical biopics like Zellweger’s Judy.
After many decades on stalled attempts to adapt Chicago from stage to screen, Marshall’s solution is to capture most of the numbers as imagined fantasies in the mind of Zellweger’s murderous Roxie Hart. Chicago was Bob Fosse’s on the stage, and this take borrows seamlessly from what Fosse was already doing (and in turn, stealing from Fellini) onscreen in films like All That Jazz. And he makes it all conceptually clear to the audience within a flash of the film’s perfect opening number that shares title with that Fosse film.
It felt revolutionary at the time, a smart way to explain the use for songs to an audience demanding justification for this purely cinematic expression. But this trick would become an easy out for some lesser musicals to come - a shame in becoming a “break out into song” musical resulted in some normalized creative backflips to pacify the genre to lingering doubters. Even if it feels emblematic of how the genre would needlessly justify its impulses, you have to admit Marshall’s idea helps integrate the score’s vaudevillian separateness from the plot with numbers like “Cell Block Tango”.
For Chicago however, this doesn’t always function as genre cowardice and can serve to enhance the sliminess of its ensemble of manipulators. Take Richard Gere’s Billy Flynn, turning the press and the court room with his theatrical spin and wielding his charm like a weapon. In “We Both Reached for the Gun”, Marshall turns his behavior into literal theatre, with Flynn the puppet master orchestrator of an entire narrative shift in Roxie’s favor. It’s a very literal interpretation of the number but also an ingenious one that meets the material’s influences with Marshall’s own conceptual imagination.
Turning the songs into an imagined playground also allows some truth to take root in regards to Roxie’s character. Like Sally Bowles, Roxie Hart’s situation makes so much more sense if she’s not a flawless singer and dancer. While Zellweger’s vocal restraints have been overblown by some of her detractors (and those complaints amplify the goodwill in seeing her sing again onscreen this year), there is something about her vocal limitations that makes her daydreams all the more pronounced in their delusion. But even more importantly, it serves the musical’s thesis about the gaucheness of celebrity without talent. After she’s a murdering headline sensation, Roxie’s voice is insignificant compared to her persona.
And with Zellweger again using her vocal limits to reflect the failing Judy Garland, it perhaps shows a willingness to be vulnerable and unpolished that also smartly serves her heroines. Something we could have appreciated more at the time.
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Reader Comments (13)
Man CZJ really earned her Oscar for this... Let's be honest, All That Jazz and Cell Block Tango are the obvious standouts here and she absolutely annihilates them!
I saw a tweet comparing Zeta Jones and the Zee with Shakira and J-Lo at the Super Bowl and now I'm obsessed with J-Lo going to Broadway and winning a Tony.
LOVE Chicago and LOVE Renee in it (and Catherine too, obviously). My vote for Best Actress of 2002, so I can't complain too much about her win this year (even if my vote would be ScarJo).
Peggy, girl, you put your sauce in every post!
Masterpiece? No. A very good entertaining movie, yes. With ups and downs. With three fabulous actresses leading an irregular cast.
Chris you failed this post by not including Nowadays.
I think Rob Marshall is underrated. He did a wonderful job with Chicago, Nine and Mary Poppins Returns, all excellent films in my book. Centering on Chicago, though, I was amazed at the staging and dancing in Cell Block Tango. Renee was OK. The producers made sure the press knew that she had no singing or dancing experience before taking on this movie.
How she did in Judy, I may never know. I really have no interest in the movie until it comes on streaming. I still think of her as very odd for the facial surgery.
Gere is the weak link of the movie, but Zellweger, CZJ and the supporting cast are firing in all cylinders.
I agree Rob Marshall is underappreciated for his achievement with Chicago. It is a great fun movie that helped ressurrect a whole genre and yet he does not get enough respect for it.
Chicago was the first musical that i watched and for some time i was literally obsessed with the movie and Renée Zellweger, specially for her performance in the musical number 'Roxie' for wich i was hoping she wins the Oscar. Now i'm not so enthusiastic about it but still think that the movie is really good.
I totally agree with the observation about the musical numbers presented as part of the imagination of the character, after Chicago I watched All That Jazz and I discover the inspiration of Rob Marshall who use that tool apropietly in Chicago but he repeated the formula in Nine making that film tedious to watch.
I think nobody uses the camera with dynamism in a musical like Bob Fosse did.
@Lahti Fa - I try!
I love love this movie- saw it first for free at sneak preview and then saw it three times on the big screen.
Rob Marshall didn't resurrect the musical. That was Baz Luhrmann for Moulin Rouge! and John Cameron Mitchell for Hedwig & the Angry Inch.
This hav me ponder on the correlation.
Moulin Rogue! revives the musical genre n Chicago won Best Pic the following year.
Roma came close to winning Best Pic as the 1st foreign film to do so last yr, n Parasite is Dark Horse to win Best Pic this yr!! 😁