After waiting out the lines at crowds at the box office, plus not wanting to fork over hard cash for two tickets, we finally saw last year’s Best Film Oscar winner the night before its successor is named. Seems like we made the right choice: Chicago was enjoyable but not great.
The quality of the singing and dancing by stars Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere was quite good, certainly better than I expected. Then again, as Rebecca Traister points out in an article in today’s Times, most actors start out doing these kinds of productions in high school and college, and Zeta-Jones did quite a bit of work on the London stage before hitting Hollywood. Zellweger was a powerful beam of light during her productions numbers, more so for me than the others. Props to John C. Riley for his role as Zellweger’s patsy husband and his performance in the Mr. Cellophane number and to Queen Latifah for a very smart job too.
But the performances were not the problem. I can be a big fan of movie musicals–I love a ton of the older ones, though have rarely found much to enjoy post-1970 or so–but here I felt like director (and choreographer) Rob Marshall spent all his energy figuring out how to stage the song and dance bits and not enough on creating a compelling movie. I never could connect with Zeta-Jones’ Velma and Gere’s lawyer was nearly repellant. Perhaps if Marshall had stayed closer to the simplicity imposed by the constraints of a theater and avoided using so much glitz and flash, I would have liked the movie better; as produced, I felt like I was watching a concert with some thin wrappers.
recommended–good but not great
BillSaysThis 