Released: July 13, 2007 (Los Angeles)
Director: Adam Shankman
*****
Between the new version of Hairspray and the success of the High School Musical films on The Disney Channel, you'd think we've entered a new era of the cinema musical. Sure, there's lots of jumping, jiving and wailing (wait, wrong type of music...) in this update, along the requisite young person angst about "love" and a dated morality tale about race integration, but the movie never rises above what it is: a movie.
Thick Tracy Turnblad has one mission in life: to dance on The Corny Collins Show, a dance program featuring local Baltimore talent. Her plus sized mother Edna patently refuses since girls like her don't get on television. Tracy goes anyway and becomes a sensation. Her righteous indignation gets the best of her during Negro Day on the show, provoking the girl to join the African American kids in a march on the station and its villainous manager Velma von Tussle.
For some reason I'm ambivalent about Hairspray. It's not a bad production; the acting is acceptable, the dancing and singing are well done; and no one takes the movie too seriously. It just doesn't knock my socks off in the same way Chicago or Moulin Rouge did. (And Rent and The Phantom of the Opera are in their own categories. Maybe it's the fact the movie takes place in a pre-integration time period and characters throughout the film see nothing wrong in keeping people separate. Maybe I never became emotionally invested in any of the characters, all of them outsiders in some way. Maybe its John Travolta in a fat suit. I'm just not sure.
Nikki Bonsky as Tracy got the lion share of the acclaim when the film premiered to the detriment of two of her costars: Michelle Pfieffer as von Tussle and James Marsden as Corny Collins. When either of them are on the screen, it's impossible to take your eyes off them. Pfieffer because of her catty villain; Marsden because he soaks up the (no pun intended) corny Corny Collins personae. He truly has fun in the role...and if he isn't, he's doing a good job acting. Queen Latifah, Allison Janney, Jerry Stiller, Christopher Walken, Zac Effron, Amanda Bynes...they're all good. There comes a moment late in the film when so many recognizable actors have been on screen, the entire affair feels like a charity event instead of a movie. The original's writer/directo John Waters cameos early, Ricki Lake (also from the original) cameo's late. Maybe that's why I'm lukewarm to Hairspray despite everything it has going for it. Playing "Guss the Actor" ruins the illusion of an alternate reality.