8 / 10
Official trailer
Chicago is Rob Marshall’s 2002 American musical adapting the 1975 John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Bob Fosse stage musical, which itself adapted the 1926 Maurine Dallas Watkins play. The film depicts murderess Roxie Hart and her rivalry with vaudeville performer Velma Kelly while both await trial for separate killings in 1920s Chicago. Renée Zellweger plays Roxie Hart.
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Velma Kelly. Richard Gere plays defense attorney Billy Flynn. Queen Latifah plays prison matron Mama Morton. John C. Reilly plays Roxie’s husband Amos Hart. Christine Baranski plays reporter Mary Sunshine.
Lucy Liu plays Kitty Baxter. Bill Condon wrote the screenplay. Miramax produced the film on a budget of approximately 45 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 307 million dollars worldwide. The work won six Academy Awards including Best Picture.
From its first number to its last, Chicago is a blast. It’s sexy, mean and funny, and it treats its audience like adults who can enjoy a murderess singing her way through her own trial. My reservation is the stretches between the numbers, which feel like the film catching its breath. Whenever the music stops I start counting down to the next song.
The film is the principal commercial success of the early 2000s American musical revival and the film that showed the genre could function as serious adult entertainment after decades of marginalization. The Marshall direction employs the Fosse-derived approach of separating the musical numbers from the dramatic scenes by setting them in Roxie’s imagination.
The cast performed all their own singing. Zeta-Jones won Best Supporting Actress. The work proved commercially viable in a way that prevailing wisdom had said American musicals couldn’t be after the 1970s.
The result is the rare modern American musical that succeeded with both critics and mass audiences.
The Imagination Frame
Marshall set every musical number inside Roxie Hart’s imagination instead of in the diegetic reality of the film. This borrowed from Fosse’s Cabaret approach while modifying it for the source. Roxie imagines herself on a vaudeville stage every time the story would conventionally call for a musical number. This solved the modern musical’s central problem. Contemporary audiences had grown resistant to characters breaking into song. Setting numbers inside imagination resolved the resistance.
The imagination frame also served the film’s satire about celebrity.
Roxie pursues fame through her trial. She imagines herself as a vaudeville star. The framing technique reinforces the film’s argument that her notion of justice is entirely about whether the trial produces fame. The structural choice supports the thematic argument. Each musical number is also evidence that Roxie’s mental life consists primarily of fantasies of celebrity.
This is the choice that sells me on the whole film. Characters bursting into song on a street corner usually wear thin fast, and Marshall’s fix lets me enjoy every number without rolling my eyes.
For Writers
Structural choices can serve thematic arguments. The same applies to fiction. The form of your work should support the content. Decisions about how you tell the story carry meaning the story itself can’t deliver.
The Cell Block Tango
The Cell Block Tango number runs approximately seven minutes and depicts six imprisoned women explaining their murders. The choreography references Fosse trademark movements including angular hand positions, controlled breaks, and isolated body parts. The lyrics combine confession with rhythmic chant. The visual design uses red lighting and prison bars. The number became the film’s defining sequence.
Zeta-Jones leads the number while playing Velma Kelly in the immediate frame. The other prisoners include actresses who wouldn’t otherwise have been cast in major American musicals. The number gives each woman her own monologue about her crime.
The film allows the ensemble work to develop individual characters instead of treating chorus members as anonymous. The choreography reinforces the principle that each woman’s story matters even when she occupies background position.
Cell Block Tango is the best seven minutes in the film and the number I’d show anyone who doubts this movie. Zeta-Jones owns it, the red light and the bars make it look like a nightmare cabaret, and every woman gets to be funny and terrifying in turn.
For Writers
Ensemble work succeeds when individual contributors receive their own moments. The result carries over to fiction. Background characters whose specifics emerge clearly serve this film better than anonymous functional figures.
The Razzle Dazzle
Gere’s performance as Billy Flynn culminates in the Razzle Dazzle number where he explains his courtroom strategy as theatrical performance. The lyrics directly state that legal procedure is entertainment and that trials are productions that lawyers stage for jury audiences. The argument the film develops without subtext is that the American legal system reads as theater instead of justice mechanism.
Gere is a lot of fun in this number. He sells the con with so much oily charm that I’d hire him myself, and the song’s cynicism about courtrooms as theater still stings.
The satire applies equally today. The film was released in 2002 while major American attention focused on celebrity trials including the recently concluded O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake cases.
The 1920s setting allowed the satire to work without seeming to target particular current cases. The work showed that period material can comment on contemporary conditions more effectively than direct contemporary engagement. The audience receives the argument without feeling lectured.
For Writers
Period settings can deliver contemporary arguments that direct contemporary settings can’t. The same applies to fiction. The historical frame gives readers space to receive criticism they’d resist in present-tense form.
Craft Note
Marshall had been a Broadway choreographer before directing Chicago. The film was his directorial debut. The combination of Broadway musical experience and limited film direction history produced a result that experienced film directors hadn’t been able to deliver during the previous two decades of musical revival attempts. The decision to cast actors who could sing instead of singers who could act paid off through performances that engaged dramatic content as well as musical content.
Is Chicago worth watching?
The early 2000s musical revival had its big commercial success in Chicago, the film that proved the genre could still work for adults.
The imagination frame solved the modern musical’s central problem, the Cell Block Tango is a knockout, and Razzle Dazzle skewers celebrity justice in ways later films haven’t matched. It’s an 8 because the talky scenes between songs sag. I’d recommend it to anyone with a taste for musicals, and to a few people who think they don’t have one.
