Chicago: Movie & DVD Review

Rob Marshall's "Chicago," newly released in a special edition DVD, is a showstopping smash, one of the best films of 2002.

Choreographed by Broadway-vet Marshall, who triumphs in what's unbelievably his first time as a feature film director, the movie initially feels as weightless as one of its dancer’s feathered boas.

But don't be fooled--the film is deceptive. By the time it ends in a rush of sequins, flashbulbs, blaring brass and back-stabbing babes, it has said plenty about how showbiz has infiltrated every corner of society--from the way we behave in our bedrooms to our courtrooms to our everyday lives--and not always for the better.

Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, the film stars Renee Zellweger as Roxie Hart, a frustrated chorus-girl wannabe who murders her lover, Fred (Dominic West), when he fails to come through with a promised audition and who then uses the media--not to mention her bumbling husband, Amos (John C. Reilly), and a handful of others--to achieve the superstardom she craves.

Already cooling her cans in the big house is Catherine Zeta-Jones' Velma Kelly, a popular vaudeville performer who, as the movie opens, has just murdered her own sister and husband after catching them performing a sizzling duet of their own in the sack.

Now, with both Velma and Roxie stewing in the same jail, it's up to Richard Gere's flamboyant attorney, Billy Flynn, to spring them free while keeping them where they long to be--smack in the middle of the public eye.

Based on Bob Fosse's 1975 musical "Chicago," itself inspired by Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1926 play and William A. Wellman's 1942 film, "Roxie Hart," Marshall's version joins them in being as big and as bawdy as one of Liz Taylor's baubles.

It's a bitchy, cynical crapshoot updated for the masses with screenwriter Bill Condon's timely observations on our culture's fascination with celebrity and instant fame. Indeed, the movie may take place in the 1920s, but its connection to the present--filled with visions of Winona Ryder, Anna Nicole Smith and at times even O.J.--is undeniable.

The film exists on two levels, shifting between Roxie's ripe imagination, in which most of the dazzling song-and-dance numbers ensue, and the grimness of real-life Chicago, where Roxie and Velma are sweating it out in jail and fighting for their lives in court.

What gives the film added sizzle is its element of surprise, the best of which comes from the selection of its cast—who, let’s face it, initially seemed so horribly miscast.

Who could have believed that Renee Zellweger had it in her to become that pouty-lipped pixie Roxie Hart, a gun-wielding, tap-dancing, murdering diva with a rotten heart and a voice of gold? Or that Catherine Zeta-Jones had such a strong, soaring singing voice, one that somehow reaches higher than her legs and plunges deeper than her neckline? Or that Richard Gere--so rigid and so serious for so damned long--would finally loosen up, gleefully stripping down to his boxer shorts and belting out Kander and Ebb's famous show tunes as if he were born to do it?

There is nothing in any of their film careers (not even Gere’s turn in “The Cotton Club”) that even hints at what they put on screen here, which makes "Chicago" one of those rare films whose casting is a slick sleight-of-hand and pure inspiration.

With Queen Latifah in a wicked supporting performance as "the keeper of the keys, the countess of the clink, the mistress of murders' row, Matron Mama Morton," Christine Taransky as the newspaper reporter, Mary Sunshine, and a terrific soundtrack that offers rousing renditions of "All That Jazz," "The Cell Block Tango" and Latifah’s commanding "When You're Good To Mama," "Chicago" is exciting and electrifying, raising the bar already lifted by "Moulin Rouge"--and leaping over it to shoot to the moon.

Grade: A