Chicago

Rob Marshall’s first film as a director takes the Kander and Ebb stage musical, first staged by Bob Fosse in 1975, and solves the problem that kept it off the screen for a quarter of a century: where do the songs come from? Bill Condon’s answer is Roxie Hart’s head. Whenever the world turns ugly, a drum rolls, a bandleader (Taye Diggs) steps to a microphone, and the scene restages itself in a theatre only she can see. It is a good idea, and for 113 minutes the film rides it hard. The result is brassy, well cast and a proper evening out. It also will not hold still long enough to let us watch anybody dance.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is the reason to buy the ticket. She opens the film with ‘All That Jazz’ in black beads, feet planted, chin up, the only member of the cast who moves like a dancer and sings to reach the back of the stalls. Velma has killed two people and would like the papers to spell her name right, and Zeta-Jones never asks us to like her, which is why we do. Queen Latifah, as the jail matron selling favours in ‘When You’re Good to Mama’, has the same ease. When either of them is on screen the film knows exactly what it is.

Renée Zellweger has the harder job and does it in a smaller voice. Her Roxie has learned everything she knows about glamour from magazines, and she plays the dramatic scenes with a twitchy, hungry watchfulness that is right for the part. The singing is thin, and in the number named after her, alone on a stage of mirrors, she charms but never takes the stage. Richard Gere talks most of his songs, which suits a lawyer, and his ‘Razzle Dazzle’, with the courtroom turned into a circus ring, is the one big number Marshall lets breathe.

It is handsome to look at. Dion Beebe lights the real Chicago in mustard and brown, the jail in cold grey, and the imagined theatre from below through tobacco smoke, so that Roxie’s fantasies always seem to be happening at two in the morning. John Myhre’s cellblock has bars that slide apart to become the set for ‘Cell Block Tango’. Colleen Atwood puts Velma in black and Roxie in silver so you can tell them apart in silhouette. Danny Elfman’s underscore stays politely out of John Kander’s way.

Then there is the editing, and we must be blunt. ‘Cell Block Tango’ is six women, six chairs, six confessions in rhythm, and Martin Walsh cuts it so fast that we never see two consecutive seconds of any one of them. A leg goes up; cut; a hand slaps a chair; cut; a face. Hoofing depends on our watching the foot hit the floor, and this film almost never shows us the foot. Our own feet were tapping under the seat, and when the number ended we realised we could not have described a single step, and we were irritated on behalf of a cast that had plainly rehearsed for months so that the cutting room could shred the result.

The one number the camera holds still for is ‘Mr Cellophane’, and it is the one that got to us. John C. Reilly, as Roxie’s dim, decent husband Amos, stands under a single bulb in clown make-up and sings about being a man nobody notices, and Marshall does nothing but let him. It is quiet and it is sad, and it is the only point at which the film’s cynicism about fame stops being a pose. There is a later sequence, involving the Hungarian inmate the others call Hunyak (Ekaterina Chtchelkanova), that we will not describe and that stays with us longer than anything in sequins.

Fosse put the songs of Cabaret (1972) on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub and let the world outside rot while the band played. Chicago borrows the shape and loses the chill; it is as pleased with Roxie’s fame as she is, and the reporters who make a star of a killer, led by Christine Baranski’s Mary Sunshine, are cartoons the film never bothers to examine. Still, it has the tunes, it has Zeta-Jones and it has Reilly under his bulb. See it for those. When the dancing starts, try not to blink; the film will do that for you.