Fame comes with a price

Ruwini JAYAWARDANA

Following the steps if the highly successful Moulin Rouge Rob Marshall’s Chicago pinpoints on the life of show girls and celebrity life in the busy Chicago city but sadly it lacks the full bodied texture embodied by the forerunner.

Chicago relates the story of Roxie Hart who dreams about making it big in show biz but ends up in prison after murdering her boyfriend. The action begins with her watching in starry eyed wonder while headliner Velma Kelly performs on stage in a jazz club. Roxie is desperate to be in Velma’s place and is even ignorant enough to get caught to a man who claims that he can make her a star in exchange for sex. An infuriated Roxie shoots him in her bedroom once she realizes that he is a fraud. She is bundled off to jail and then realizes that the murder trail is her one way ticket to fame.

When she becomes a celebrity overnight with the help of a playboy lawyer named Billy Flynn she incurs the shame of her henpecked husband Amos and the jealousy of Velma. Each of these important episodes unfurl followed by a track. All of the musical numbers in Chicago serve the storyline well. They imply that the incidents are pieced together for entertainment purposes just like a Broadway drama. Fame and fortune are not ever lasting and you have to make most of your time in the limelight to reap your rewards.

Unlike most movies made during the era Chicago is clearly not a biography or a love story. It focuses on media sensationalized criminal trials which develop to resemble a circus in which, if the defendant plays her cards right, she could achieve stardom. It goes along with the movie’s tag line ‘If you cannot be famous, be infamous.’This is exactly what Velma and Roxie does with the help of the lawyer, the press and the abused excuse.

Similar to Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb’s 1975 musical Broadway adaptation of Maurine Dallas Watkins’s play, Chicago, Marshall’s movie projects a jazz-and-liquor milieu coming alive via sexy song-and-dance. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renée Zellweger, Richard Gere, John C. Reilly, Queen Latifah, Christine Baranski, Taye Diggs, Dominic West, Lucy Liu, Deirdre Goodwin and others who have performed movies of other genres give commendable performances in techniques that may be new to them. Zellweger and Gere give an exceptional act in the number “They Both Reached for the Gun”, where Gere becomes the literal mouthpiece for Zellweger’s character and a puppeteer of the media. Another standout is Queen Latifah’s piece “When You’re Good to Mama”. Though she is a rapper by profession Latifah shows that she is more than capable of handling a serious role like Matron “Mama” Morton.

One of the disappointments of Chicago is the fact that Zellweger and Zeta-Jones are not given ample opportunity to form a proper relationship till curtain call. Setting the two killer damsels on screen together would have been a dazzling spectacle but unfortunately screenwriter Bill Condon has not taken pains to flesh out a relationship between the two leading ladies.

Marshall has not explored the glitz and glamour of the settings of the film’s 1920s Chicago environ in his movie. Instead the background mostly comprises of people, costumes and mannerism used in the era.

Both Zellweger and Zeta-Jones carry off their roles well but out of the two only Zellweger has been given space to snuggle into her character. Thus she comes across as more vulnerable and even sexier than Zeta-Jones. Though Zeta-Jones plays an extremely important role in the plot, her character has not been given enough screen space for the actress to develop her character. Therefore she is a pale comparison to Zellweger’s Roxie.