“If you can’t be famous, be infamous” is the tagline for Chicago, and that’s all you really need to know about the story. This simplicity is exactly why Chicago works as well as it does. It is, after all, a musical. When people are already breaking into song and dance, it’s best not to throw in any Adaptation-style complexities.
Renée Zellweger plays Roxie Hart, a jazz-age wannabe club singer who shoots her lover in a desperate rage, while Catherine Zeta-Jones is Velma Kelly, the woman Roxie longs to be, who murders her sister and husband after she finds them enjoying more than just each other’s company. Richard Gere plays Billy Flynn, a lawyer who thinks he could have saved Christ from the cross. Both ladies wind up in prison and end up battling it out for Billy’s and the press’ attention.
Although many were initially worried about the casting of actors instead of singers, each of the stars manages nicely. Zeta-Jones, who reportedly performed in musical theatre before her Hollywood stardom, comes off as the most natural, while Gere is more watchable than he’s been in a long time. Zellweger is also very strong in her transformation from a relatively innocent wannabe star to a ruthless and needy attention-grabber.
People throughout the film industry are already declaring the musical is back. Along with Moulin Rouge, it looks like Chicago will be leading the charge. But while Chicago is very much a musical, it departs from tradition in how it incorporates its song-and-dance numbers into the story. Instead of having the characters just randomly begin to sing, writer Bill Condon uses Roxie’s imagination to drive the cleverly choreographed and excellently filmed routines. Every important scene is shown in a strange dichotomy as the camera cuts between the real and imagined (read singing version) of events. The film’s highlight is a press conference in which Flynn is the master puppeteer, using Roxie as a ventriloquist’s dummy and pulling the strings of the press.
Besides singing and dancing, there’s only one thing this film provides plenty of, and that’s cynicism. In Chicago, the justice system only works for those on the front page of the paper and fame lasts just as long as it takes the ink to dry on tomorrow’s edition. The newspapers even print separate “Innocent” and “Guilty” issues during Roxie’s trial, hedging their bets. Despite all the evidence against her, Roxie’s fate is still in the hands of the media-consuming public. Billy Flynn sums it up best when he says, “That’s Chicago.”
