Adam Shankman’s film of the stage musical is bright, tuneful and danced by people who can dance, with Nikki Blonsky a real find. It is also a good deal nicer than the John Waters film it descends from, and it has lost some bite along the way.
John Waters made Hairspray in 1988 as a cheap, cheerful film about a fat girl who wanted to dance on television in the Baltimore he grew up in. It became a Broadway musical, and Adam Shankman’s film is a film of that musical, with a screenplay by Leslie Dixon and songs by Marc Shaiman. The result is bright, tuneful and danced by people who can dance. It is also a good deal nicer than Waters was, and the niceness has cost it something we will come to.
Nikki Blonsky had not made a film before this one, and you would not know it. She wakes up in the first scene, sings to the city out of her bedroom window and on to the back of a dustcart, and by the end of the number we were on her side and grinning. She is short and wide and the film never once treats that as the joke; Tracy is the person in every room who has already decided things will work out, and Blonsky plays it as a kind of stubbornness. James Marsden’s Corny Collins has a grin you could open tins with. Zac Efron’s Link Larkin does a decent Elvis lip.
The look is a sweet shop. Bojan Bazelli lights Baltimore so the row houses seem freshly painted and the studio floor glows pink and mint. David Gropman builds the Turnblads’ flat above the joke shop as brown, cramped and full of ironing, and the Corny Collins set as tiers of pastel risers. Rita Ryack puts Tracy in checks and polka dots and Amber Von Tussle in the pale, expensive pastels of a girl who has never been told no. The numbers are staged so we can see feet, and Michael Tronick cuts on the beat rather than across it, holding wide shots for whole phrases. Shaiman’s songs pastiche early-sixties girl groups and Motown, and the cast sing them themselves.
Michelle Pfeiffer is the best thing in it. Her Velma Von Tussle is a former beauty queen running a television station out of spite, and Pfeiffer plays her at screwball speed, all narrowed eyes and vanity. Christopher Walken’s Wilbur runs a joke shop and thinks it is a serious business, and his duet with John Travolta’s Edna, a soft-shoe among the whoopee cushions, is the one stretch where the Turnblad marriage feels lived in. Queen Latifah, as Motormouth Maybelle, gets “I Know Where I’ve Been” and sings it slowly, to a crowd that has stopped moving. It moved us more than we thought a film that had spent an hour on hair could manage. It also left us uneasy, because the film needs her grief chiefly so that the white girl’s story can matter, and it does not seem to have noticed.
Then there is Travolta. Divine played Edna in 1988 as a woman who was plainly a man. Travolta plays her as a woman, under padding and a rubber face that will not move, with an accent that wanders in from nowhere in particular. The idea, a shy mother who has hidden indoors for years, is the right one. The execution is a special effect. Every time the film cut to Edna we found ourselves looking at the prosthetics rather than the person, and when she finally dances, late on, the padding wobbles and the joke stops being the one intended.
The bigger loss is the bite. Waters treated segregation as a fact of the city his kids simply barged past. Here it is a lesson, delivered in a speech and a hymn, and Velma’s racism is made cartoonish enough that nobody watching could mistake themselves for her. Elijah Kelley’s Seaweed is the best dancer on screen and gets the sharpest number, and the film keeps forgetting he is a character rather than a dance break. At 116 minutes there is a slack half hour in the middle, once Tracy is on the show and before anything is at stake, where the songs keep coming and the story does not.
It carries a PG and it is a family film in the proper sense: the children will want the songs again and the adults will get Pfeiffer. Watch it with the volume up. Someone on the sofa will complain about Travolta and they will be right, and then the next number will start and nobody will mind for three minutes.
