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CHICAGO
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They gave the Oscar to the wrong actress.
In this MTV-flash commedia dell 'arte set in gangland Chicago ("It's a circus, it's a three-ring circus," says flamboyantly crooked lawyer Billy Flynn (Richard Gere, PRETTY WOMAN), speaking of a trial but equally applicable to this movie), Catherine Zeta-Jones (ZORRO) as headliner Velma Kelly wraps her magnificently curved-lip, cocked-eyebrow, sultry-princess expression around flat Yank vowels and tough-talking-moll dialog that feels like Myrna Loy out-takes from The Thin Man. But Renee Zellweger (BRIDGET JONES's DIARY), as star-struck two-timer-plugging Roxie Hart, provides both genuine complexity in her character and facial nuance, unlike the smirking mug that now comprises Gere's default facial expression and most of his emotional gamut (from A to B, as Dorothy Parker wrote).
We enjoy watching Zellweger, but we are supposed to enjoy Flynn, the surrogate for author-choreographer-philanderer Bob Fosse. As a lawyer, Flynn is a stage maestro ("Will you please tell the audience – I mean, the jury," he simpers in one of the many nudge-nudge winks to us moviegoers), puppeteering not only the press but also his ventriloquist-dummy client Roxie – two images that are played out in an extravagant but exquisite set-piece song-and-dance. He is a serial defender – love 'em, acquit 'em, and throw 'em over for the next pretty minx with a cupid's-bow mouth and a sob story of Love Gone Wrong. Advocacy as seduction.
Flynn is yet another externalization of Fosse's subconscious, which must long ago have fallen off his (unfortunately, dead) body from atrophy for lack of use. There's nothing to suppress when everything is expressed, as Johnnie Cochran (another lawyer as flimflam man) might have said. Gere woos Roxie and then, when he examines her on the stand, she rises to his every verbal caress, even collapsing in an orgiastic faint after describing how, in a jealous righteous rage, she shot Fred Casely. (Faked, of course, that's another Fosse conceit. "What a bulls-eye, huh?" she murmurs to Flynn as he 'wakes' her.)
In this panegyric for promiscuity, as Spiro Agnew would have wished to say, we see all of Fosse's hallmarks: languid grappling ensemble dances as orgies in mime, rapid intercuts between set-piece musical numbers; two girls in bed with a guy; women shooting two-timing men; Liza Minelli (oh, sorry, Zeta-Jones) as Sally Bowles (oops, Velma Kelly) in black stockings, black foundation, black bra, black hat, black bobbed hair; and a back story that makes sense only if you look away quickly (as director Rob Marshall does). "Give 'em the old razzle-dazzle," (creditably) sings Gere, and Marshall does. Plot rickety? Who cares? Show a flash of thigh and let's have a song!
CHICAGO is filled with single-entendre numbers (there is no meaning aside
from the sexual), each of them marvelously if loudly staged and pretty well
danced. At one point Gere does a fine extended tap-dance, seeming really
to be enjoying himself. Zellweger has the moves, and Zeta-Jones, it's
not so much that the dog talked well as … oh, never mind, I'm being unkind.
In the end, CHICAGO is a jumbled rehash of 1972's CABARET (with pastiches of
ALL THAT JAZZ and a splash of DICK TRACY for color), an aggressively soundtracked,
beautifully choreographed, well sung-and-danced … bad movie.