Hairspray
Directed by Adam Shankman
Hairpray isn’t noxious like the Dreamgirls movie-musical, but it isn’t nearly good enough. Based on John Waters’ 1988 satire of civil rights-era nostalgia, this movie-musical adaptation makes the same mistake as the 2002 Broadway incarnation—it domesticates Waters’ parodistic anarchy into general-audience silliness.
All of Waters’ ideas about social conventions, race and sex rebellion are flattened; the characters representing subversive ideologies are broadened into caricatures: Baltimore high school girl Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) bursts with enthusiasm for the afternoon TV dance program, The Corny Collins Show, a locally produced version of 1960s rock ’n’ roll mania. Anxious to dance with the show’s token black teens who are relegated to once-a-month appearances, Tracy wants “every day to be Negro Day” and inspires a protest rally calling for integration.
For Waters, Tracy’s chubby-girl, open-hearted race-mixing wasn’t a social statement—his underground sensibility was having fun with the 1980s concept of “difference” and its discontents. Tracy provokes a near-riot that gets her overweight mother Edna (originally played by Divine, now by John Travolta) out from behind her ironing-board and laundry piles—seemingly a personal and political liberation. But this was not a feminist point (Edna enjoys her domestic arts) so much as Waters’ nervy alignment of fat with feminism, keeping social progress outré. Director-choreographer Adam Shankman’s film version turns Waters’ human comedy into penguin antics similar to Happy Feet.
As with Dreamgirls, Hairspray’s transition to the screen is banal. Both shows traduce ’60s pop music and make its development alongside historic social change seem trite. Hairspray’s climactic tune, “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” oversimplifies the cultural complications that Waters knew were still relevant to contemporary, impoverished, racially-striated Baltimore. This Hairspray’s shrill fantasy suggests all that was in the easily-condescended-to past. Shankman imagines a TV-dance-party utopia, linking rock ’n’ roll fatuousness to TV-generation inanity. He fails the rapturous yet unsettling vision of David Lynch’s pop-nostalgia parodies in Mulholland Drive, Tom Hanks’ ’60s reminiscences in That Thing You Do and the exact fond spoofing of Bye Bye Birdie.
Originally, Waters’ Hairspray was a hipster’s retort to Back to the Future—the most brilliantly written American movie of the 1980s—yet never bested its out-front subversiveness. Instead, Waters complemented its pop-music irony (casting Ruth Brown and Debbie Harry the way Back to the Future invoked Chuck Berry); using cultural totems as part of realpolitik. To convert Hairspray into Broadway’s commercial strictures undermines Waters’ achievement.
Strange to say, but all this music and dancing separates Hairpray from realpolitik through Shankman’s overly-cheery staging and not-quite ironic performances. It’s production-number dancing rather than authentic pop ritual; verisimilitude is swamped under too-loud orchestrations and Grease-style hullabaloo. While Waters stressed human idiosyncrasy, these characters are clownish: Travolta wiggles nicely when Edna feels most ladylike but mostly he looks weird, like a Buddha in a housedress. It’s Travolta’s Norbit but not as rich as Eddie Murphy’s. (Ironically, Divine’s drag act was, in fact, a genuine characterization.) Christopher Walken and Michelle Pfeiffer can’t find the character in their one-dimensional roles. Blonsky, at least, makes Tracy a one-girl pep rally. But only Amanda Bynes as Tracy’s best friend, Penny, comes close to credible emotion; she looks at the high school’s dazzling black dancer, Seaweed (Elijah Kelley), with googly-eyed bliss. Yet, composer-lyricist Marc Shaiman never gives Penny and Seaweed a worthy duet.
Shaiman’s songs are a manic pastiche like his South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut score. But pastiche used for historic social progress, as in the protest tunes “I Know Where I’ve Been” and “Come So Far” (egregious solos by Queen Latifah as Motormouth Maybelle), is dispiriting. Waters ingeniously allowed R&B legend Ruth Brown an aura that contained the struggle and perseverance of the “race music” era when she and fellow black pop artists were stigmatized and music was segregated. Latifah however represents untroubled bravado, bluster not courage—pop music without soul. Currently, she seems especially bogus opposite Amy Winehouse’s Waters-worthy white-negro act—an insouciance so wacky/progressive it embarrasses this movie’s namby-pamby radicalism.
Hairspray’s songs suddenly switch from satire to sappy sanctimony. But back in the 1950s, Broadway’s Finian’s Rainbow used song and comedy to more sincerely address the race issue. Hairspray merely wishes it away on waves of phony uplift and processed euphoria.
