Chicago; The 25th Hour
The myth of American innocence is taking quite a beating on movie screens this season, and it's about time. Martin Scorsese's flawed but astonishing Gangs of New York is the most skeptical Hollywood costume movie of recent years-a bloody urban Western that insists that selfish lawlessness and unchecked rage predated the creation of the United States, continue to exist within it and will be around forever. In a strange way, the long-awaited movie version of the stage hit Chicago feels like a companion piece to Gang. Based on a 1920s case, it says many of the same things about human nature and the American character specifically. It's full of characters who wrap their self-interested schemes in the garb of public service and fellow feeling, and reminds us that this brand of public playacting is just a continuation of showbiz by other means.
Directed by choreographer-filmmaker Rob Marshall (whose ABC version of Annie was one of the best pure musicals ever aired on American tv), Chicago is an energetically visceral musical comedy about two female murderers catfighting for control of the public's fancy. It doesn't aim to inspire or ennoble anyone; it just wants to tell the truth about our nastier tendencies and send us home humming a tune.
Chicago's original source material is a 1926 play by Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was inspired to write it after covering the trial of Beulah Annan, a 20-year-old mechanic's wife accused of killing her lover. Behind bars, Annan met another accused murderess, Belva Gaertner, and the two became pals, even posing for a tabloid photo together. The public was fascinated by both women, and some historians believe their fascination led a jury to acquit Annan. She was helped mightily by showboating attorney W.W. O'Brien, the Johnnie Cochran of his day-a Professor Harold Hill type who conflated justice with winning, and who understood that if you can make a jury see themselves in your client, they'll excuse any crime.
The musical version of Chicago hit Broadway in 1975, and a version is still running now. The production was a collaboration between writers John Kander and Fred Ebb and their best interpreter, choreographer-director Bob Fosse. Theatergoers were struck by all the echoes of 60s and 70s media freakshows, and those who saw the 1990s revival (I was one of them) felt the same way; after years of O.J. Simpson madness, the shock of deja vu was as liberating as it was appalling. Marshall's movie version continues the hall-of-mirrors vibe, both indicting and celebrating the allure of tabloid culture.
Rethinking the stage revival as a psychological drama with music (the sharp screenplay is by Gods and Monsters screenwriter Bill Condon), Chicago owes a debt to the late British writer Dennis Potter, whose tv dramas framed musical numbers within the imaginations of harassed, marginalized lead characters. The film's heroine, wannabe showgirl and accused beau-killer Roxie Hart (toxic cutie pie Renee Zellweger, looking and sounding more like Shirley MacLaine than ever), fantasizes a musical adventure while winding her way through Chicago's hopelessly corrupt criminal justice system. Roxie only seems sugary and naive, though. She murdered her rotten-hearted lover after an ugly confrontation, then convinced her kindly dope of a husband (scene-stealer John C. Reilly, in his third great performance this month) that she acted in self-defense. In jail, Roxie's star is overshadowed by that of another vixen, Roxie's idol, showgirl Velma Kelly (brassy Catherine Zeta-Jones, in a turbo-vamp performance that's like Madonna channeling Barbara Stanwyck).
Though Velma is a showbiz vet and Roxie is a wannabe, they both understand the benefits that accrue to Number-One Stars. So they undermine and fight each other to garner media attention and the favors of their exploitative warden (Queen Latifah, whose hardcase posturing and resonant voice set the film's tone). And they vie for the attention of all-powerful criminal attorney Billy Flynn (a smashing performance by Richard Gere, whose predatory smirk has never seemed more gleeful). Flynn's a fantastic character-possibly the least-sincere man in American musical theater, a flim-flam man posing as a public servant and a supposed do-gooder who never lifts a finger unless he's sure it'll come to rest on a thick stack of cash. ("All I Care About Is Love," Flynn croons, in a number that's all about money.)
In Gangs, Scorsese and his screenwriters present every social stratum in New York as a band of hooligans, some better dressed than others. In Chicago, the nightclub entertainers, theater audiences, newspaper readers, prisoners, guards, prison bosses, reporters, lawyers, judges and everyone else are conceived through the prism of showbiz. Marshall and Condon crosscut between the past and the present, between the jailhouse and the city outside, turning the film into one big psychic landscape of penny-dreadful melodrama. Its high point is a smashing rendition of "We Both Reached for the Gun," in which Roxie and Billy lay out their murder defense; the film jumps effortlessly between Billy and Roxie's press conference and a phantasmal dream version of the defense (drawn from the stage version) in which Roxie's is portrayed as a ventriloquist's dummy mouthing her lawyer's words. Like Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Lipstick on Your Collar and other classics, Chicago literalizes the notion that musical numbers are an expression of the unchained id.
Fosse's spirit appears to have possessed Marshall, and that's a good thing. Fosse understood the mechanics of life in the media age better than any contemporary entertainer, and he expressed those mechanics on film, on tv and the stage. He'd probably gag reading a review that accused him of having a message, but he did have one, and it went like this: Life is a selfish act; every waking moment of life (including work, play, love and sex) is a type of performance; we must be careful what we pretend to be, because we are what we pretend to be. This was the subject of Fosse's films, Lenny, Cabaret, All that Jazz and Star 80, all of which dealt, to some degree, with damaged, dysfunctional, selfish people fleeing reality for fantasy and paying a horrible price. It is the subject of Chicago as well. Marshall's movie is equally an adaptation of a stage source and an extended homage to one of America's most important (and least understood) pop artists. As in Brian De Palma's inventive reworking of Hitchcock devices, every frame of Chicago either appropriates or radically rethinks what Fosse did on stage and on film, from the choreography to the lighting to the performance style (psychological realism plus vaudeville shtick) to the razzle-dazzle editing.
Like Gangs, Marshall's film presents urban America as a concrete jungle where Darwinism rules. Some characters do literal violence to each other (specifically the murderers behind bars awaiting legal and media trial). But there's another kind of violence on display here, perpetrated with words and deeds via media outlets that act as our collective storytellers. When Kander and Ebb's musical first debuted, this trope was rude, provocative and valuable, and it's nice to see that time hasn't dulled its razor edge. The slimebags of Chicago express themselves in song; it's nasty, honest music.
But 25th Hour didn't make me rethink my disappointment with Lee. This drama about an Irish-American drug dealer (Norton) celebrating his last night of freedom before going to jail for seven years has five or six terrific scenes that stick in the craw mainly because Lee's cast is so fine. (Lee never lost his talent for casting.) But in every other way, it's a Spike Lee Joint, which means DisJointed. The melancholy misadventures of Norton and his Catholic school buddies (sad-sack schoolteacher Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wall Street punk Barry Pepper) are supposed to form the core of the drama, but Lee and screenwriter David Benioff (adapting his own novel) don't bother to get the characters together until a third of the way through the picture's nearly 140-minute running time. That's about 50 minutes too long, in my opinion.
The title 25th Hour is bound to inspire mean jokes, and with good reason: Lee's movie is a long, long trip that doesn't take you anywhere you didn't already go in The Last Detail, Straight Time and other films about the psychic burden of imprisonment. Norton is watchable, sometimes touching, but his character is cool, mopey and vague, more a concept than a person; he's overshadowed by Hoffman and Pepper, and by Brian Cox, who's sensational as the hero's bar-owner father.
There's no internal logic to the arrangement of Lee's present-day scenes and his flashbacks to Norton's relationship with his possibly deceptive girlfriend (Rosario Dawson, who looks so fine you might forget she doesn't have a character to play). The lurch-and-stop rhythms are a familiar Lee problem. Ditto the ripped-from-the-headlines topical references (in this case, including a series of inherently powerful but dramatically irrelevant 9/11 references), a montage of racial slurs (taken from the novel), Terence Blanchard's "Pardon me while I stick this trumpet in your ear" score and the film's many self-conscious and inappropriate camera stunts (including Lee's amazingly silly People Mover Shot, which he introduced 12 years ago in Mo' Better Blues and seems hell-bent on using until we give up and decide we like it).
I'm all for stylistic brio and political content-I beat the drum for these qualities so often that I probably give readers headaches-but Lee doesn't provide those things anymore; he just pretends to. I wanted to love 25th Hour. Toward the end, after Lee made me sit through five endings to a film that could have finished powerfully 30 minutes earlier, I wanted to take out a pen and draw hashmarks on the back of the seat in front of me, like a prisoner of Movie Jail.