Chicago (2002)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions