...how can you not like a movie in which John Travolta and Christopher Walken sing a love song to each other? And you believe it!
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John Waters has always championed the underdog in his eccentric little movies, and "Hairspray" is no exception. Waters originally created the film in 1988, then with other people adding music it went on to Broadway, and finally we got the musical film version in 2007. In essence, it took the same route as Mel Brooks's "Producers," only I think this newest "Hairspray" is even more successful than Brooks's effort. "Hairspray" starts on a high note and never comes down. If it has any fault at all, it's that it hardly takes a minute to breathe and leaves one rather exhausted by the end from laughing and toe-tapping. Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours, you know?
"Hairspray" celebrates diversity and does so in lively song and dance. It celebrates diversity of race, sex, opinion, and physique. As Waters himself says on one of the documentaries, folks probably discriminate as much against overweight (he says "fat") people as much as they discriminate against blacks or gays or any other minority (an exaggeration, to be sure, but he likes to make a point). For instance, he says, the overweight girl never gets the boy in a movie. So he decided to make a film about an overweight girl who does win the day and get the boy. "Hairspray" does so with high good humor, and while it inflates its ideas, even to the point of corniness, it's the way it's meant to be. Overstatement rules in this movie, and I for one wouldn't want it any other way.
Director Adam Shakman ("The Wedding Singer," "Cheaper By the Dozen 2") takes Waters' ideas and characters and the Broadway musical's songs and dances and fashions the best version of the story yet. Really. Even if you don't like musicals, if this one doesn't get your blood pumping, you're dead.
The setting is Baltimore, Maryland, 1962, and most of the characters are teenagers in high school. Apparently, those of us who graduated from high school in 1962 were unaware of the magic of that period as it was happening, a magic both Waters in "Hairspray" and George Lucas in "American Graffiti" capture in their films. It was the end of an era, a time just before the advent of full racial integration, women's lib, Vietnam, the mistrust of government, the sexual revolution, the British music invasion, the hippie movement, and so much more that was to change the course of American life. In "Hairspray" Waters tried to hint at these coming changes and poke fun at the more conservative ethic of the day.
Understand, the movie is practically all music and dance. The script uses dialogue only sparingly to connect the musical numbers. So things start right out with the main character, Tracy Trunblad (Nikki Blonsky), a cute, bubbly, round teenager, missing the bus and heading for high school on the back of a garbage truck, all the while singing her heart out. It's one of the best sequences in the show, and the movie maintains that standard. Tracy may not fit everyone's image of the all-American girl, but she faces life confident of herself and unafraid.
Then we meet the secondary characters: Tracy's best friend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes); Penny's uptight religious-zealot mother, Prudy (Allison Janney); and Tracy's mom and dad, Edna and Wilbur. It's in the casting of the parents that the movie shows more of its brilliance. John Travolta in a fat suit plays Edna, and he does so convincingly. We perhaps occasionally recognize the voice, but otherwise we see in his performance as effective an acting job as Divine (Harris Glen Milstead) did in the original. Similarly unlikely, Christopher Walken plays Wilbur, the dad; wearing hopelessly old-fashioned, see-through seersucker shirts, he is endearingly sweet and charming. Edna is obese and has never left the house in ten years for fear of someone seeing her; and Wilbur is a dorky sort who owns a joke shop, the Hardy-Har Hut. Yet they are the most loving and supportive parents a kid could want, and when Tracy decides to audition for a part on the local TV dance program, "The Corny Collins Show," the father especially couldn't be happier. Forget about the fact that you're overweight, he tells her; go for it. Which she does, and you can guess the result.
James Marsden plays Corny Collins, the host of the dance show, patterned after a real TV program in Baltimore at the time called "The Buddy Deane Show," which itself was a hometown version of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand." (Clark has always been proud of the fact that he was among the first people to integrate such a show racially.) In yet another brilliant performance, Michelle Pfeiffer plays Velma Von Tussle, the Witched-Witch general manager of the television station. Velma is a former Miss Baltimore who is everyone's idea of the clichéd white snob. She only wants singers and dancers on "The Corny Collins Show" who are young, white, beautiful, and slim. For Tracy, three out of four isn't good enough ("I want that chubby Communist girl off the show!"). However, Velma does concede to having a single program each week called "Negro Day," during which the show uses black singers and dancers. It's just that many of the white folks in town consider any rock-and-roll as "race music," so it's a grudging concession.
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[release]22206[/release]