Chicago: All Sizzle. No Steak.

Chicago
*****
Chicago is an insult both to its audience and to the original play. The problem is not that the movie emphasizes style over substance. The best style-over-substance films transcend their genre. The Kill Bill films, for example, served as an homage to samurai flicks (and to the westerns that borrowed from them), and, through expert directing, acting, and dialogue, transcended them.

But Chicago was an homage to nothing. Or rather, an homage to itself. The film was a commercial for its own Oscar marketing campaign.

Chicago was made for one purpose only: to win Best Picture (read: make a ton of money) for its studio. Chicago swooped-in at the end of the year and immediately began billing itself in advertisements and trailers as an Oscar contender. The movie seemed to be released in December for the sole purpose of creating enough momentum to win best picture; if it had been released at the beginning of the year, rather than the end, it probably wouldn’t have won. The film itself looks dazzling on the big screen, and was sure to dazzle audiences. And that all that dazzle did a wonderful thing for the producers--and a terrible thing to audiences: It covered-up the stench of reality. Fundamentally, this is a terrible movie.

Am I supposed to be amazed by the fact that Catherine Zeta Jones & Co. can sing? Sing, they can, but does that make the film deserving of a Best Picture nod? That’s a different question. Overall, the film’s acting, directing, and screenwriting were mediocre at best. Rob Marshall’s rules seemed to be: (1) film on one soundstage with three sets; (2) paint all scenes completely black in order to hide any depth; and (3) use three white lights and three red lights. Such techniques were branded by many as “dazzling” and “innovative.”

They were neither. He might as well have just filmed the theatrical play being performed, and packaged that as the film. The producers clearly worked up an intentional “buzz” campaign, in the hopes that all the dazzle and buzz would carry it through to the Oscars. It seems to have worked. But Chicago has no purpose. It accomplished nothing, in terms of entertainment value or art.

I did not see the film on the big screen; I saw it for the first time on DVD. And I believe that allowed me to see the film for what it truly was: A failure, cloaked in protection of a brilliant marketing campaign. Chicago should never have been made.